The stoic professor taught Sanskrit and linguistics some 20 years ago to students who became Cambodia’s most accomplished linguists.
He spent months in Cambodia’s most sparsely-populated province, over a period of years, to document one of the country’s minority languages, Bunong.
Sylvain Vogel, a native French and German speaker who grew up in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France, has written and published four books about Bunong while the language’s sustained existence in northeastern Cambodia is threatened by modernization and encroachment by a growing population.
Vogel has spent most of the past 25 years in Cambodia studying, researching and teaching, and helping anchor the fledgling re-birth of a culture of scholarship in this Southeast Asian country following the repressive and anti-intellectual Khmer Rouge rule of the 1970s.
Read more: Voice of America