Say Cmbrau and you will almost certainly get it wrong. The word opens with a consonant cluster and no proper vowel to lean on - a minor, unstressed fragment that linguists call a presyllable, the front half of what they name a sesquisyllable: a syllable and a half. English has nothing like it. Neither, for the most part, does the rest of the language family. In Arem, it is not an exception at all. Between 55 and 60 percent of the vocabulary is built this way, against 35 to 40 percent in the Vietic languages that use the pattern at all. And Cmbrau is what the people who speak it call themselves.
Arem does two rare things at once. It carries the tonal and phonational system - a register of voice quality as much as pitch - that marks the Vietic branch off from everything around it, and it leans harder on sesquisyllables than any of its relatives. The effect is a language that sounds compressed at the front and precisely weighted at the back, where a change in the creak or breathiness of a vowel does the work that a whole different word would do elsewhere. Historical linguists care about this out of proportion to the number of speakers, because Arem preserves stages of sound change that its larger cousins have long since flattened out. It is a small language holding a large amount of evidence.
Arem belongs to the Vietic branch of Austroasiatic - the same branch that produced Vietnamese and Muong, languages spoken by tens of millions of people. Within Vietic it sits in the Chut group, alongside Sach, Ruc and May. The comparison is not flattering to anyone's sense of linguistic fairness. Two of these languages became national and regional standards with literatures, broadcast media and dictionaries; the others stayed in a handful of mountain villages and have been steadily squeezed. UNESCO classifies Arem as critically endangered, which is the last category before the one nobody wants to use.
In 1960 someone counted the Arem and arrived at fifty-three: thirty men and twenty-three women. That is not an estimate or a rounding; it is a complete census of a people. By 1999 a survey found 102, though even then only about a quarter were using the language consistently. Estimates of the wider Arem community by 2021 run to several hundred, depending on who is counted as Arem and by which authority. The count of fluent speakers has gone the other way. Around twenty were reported in 2015 and again in a 2018 assessment; a 2021 figure puts native speakers at seven. Whichever number is closest, everyone who speaks Arem also speaks Vietnamese, and some speak Khua or Lao besides.
Until 1956, the Arem lived as nomadic hunters and gatherers deep in the forested mountains, sheltering in caves, in trees and in temporary shelters, moving with what the season offered. They and the Ruc were the last of the Chut groups to begin building permanent houses, in the 1960s. It would be easy to write that as a curiosity, and it should not be. What it describes is a body of practical expertise - knowing which slope holds water in the dry months, which cave stays cool, which plants are food and which are medicine - accumulated over generations and specific to one stretch of Annamite limestone. Vietic peoples are indigenous to these mountains and their knowledge of local ecology is correspondingly deep. Sedentarisation did not erase that knowledge. It did remove the daily circumstances in which it was passed on, and it is those circumstances, more than any policy, that a language lives inside.
Today most Arem speakers in Vietnam live in the communities of Ban Ban and Tan Trach, in Quang Binh province, where roughly 156 people are recorded in village No. 39. They share it with Ma Coong families, a Bru-Van Kieu group, and Ma Coong is the language most widely spoken there. Vietnam classifies the Arem as a subgroup of the Chut. The rest of the speech community lives across the border in Laos, in the same mountains, cut by a frontier the language predates. What has been preserved outside living memory sits in an archive: the linguist Michel Ferlus and Tran Tri Doi recorded an Arem corpus now held in the Pangloss Collection at the CNRS in Paris, and Ferlus published a full description, Arem, a Vietic Language, in Mon-Khmer Studies in 2014. Recordings are not a language. But if it comes to that, they will be what is left, and someone thought to make them in time.
The Arem speech area straddles the Laos-Vietnam border around 18.18N, 105.34E, in the northern Annamite Range - Khammouane and Bolikhamsai provinces on the Lao side, Quang Binh province on the Vietnamese side. There is nothing to see from the air that marks a language boundary; what is visible is why the language survived at all. The terrain is steep, forested limestone and sandstone ridge country, deeply dissected, with settlements confined to narrow valley floors and few roads of any kind. Best viewed from 8,000-12,000 ft AGL, low enough to make out the isolated valley clearings that hold individual villages. The Annamite crest runs northwest-southeast as the main navigational reference; Route 8 crosses it well to the north, Route 12 to the south. Nearest airports: Vinh, Vietnam (VVVH) to the northeast, Dong Hoi, Vietnam (VVDH) to the southeast, Thakhek (VLTK) to the southwest, and Nakhon Phanom, Thailand (VTUW). Cloud and rain dominate the eastern slopes for much of the year; November to February gives the clearest air.