The Khmer's are the main ethnic group in Cambodia. The name of Pol Pot's Maoist army, the Khmer Rouge, was coined by the French, and means "The red Khmers". Khmer is also the name of the language of Cambodia.

Khmer is really different to Thai, though some of the written characters are identical. The spoken language sounds nice. It's got the round bouncing D and R consonants of Mandarin, but not the constricted s/z sounds that are impossible to say. Sometimes it sounds like Thai, but then you hear sounds that are distinctly non-Thai, like cut-off vowels "a-ha ah" that are not possible in Thai's grammar, and sound Middle-eastern.

I witnessed some impressive multi-lingual skills while we were waiting for the rest of the tour group to get through immigration. It seems like a lot of people there can speak both Khmer and Thai. All the Cambodian's I've spoken to so far speak excellent English (much better than any Thai's I've met) and many of them speak French too.

On the trip from Poipet to Siam Reap, we stopped at a road-side restaurant for lunch, and it was at this time that I decided I must learn some Khmer, even though I had previously decided I wasn't going to bother. I just hate awkwardly saying "Thank-you" in English, when it's much easier to learn the local word for it and use that. So I decided to learn the basics of Khmer - just enough to say please and thank you, and order food. After I checked into the Orchard Guesthouse, I got one of the staff to tell me a couple of Khmer phrases. He speaks Thai, so I ended up having conversation with him (a Cambodian) in Thai about his girlfriend, who's Japanese and lives in Bangkok. Now that's multicultural.