Ken Rangsey, a professor at the Department of Khmer Literature at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP), has come to prominence as one of the foremost experts on the finer details of the Khmer language.

Hailing from Preah Bat Choan Chum commune’s Kampong village of Takeo province’s Kirivong district, the 38-year-old has a way with words, one might say, but it’s not what you’re thinking it is.

Rangsey doesn’t write romantic poetry or eloquent essays. He writes textbooks and books about the individual words as part of his academic work.

After graduating from Tonleab High School in 2002, Rangsey earned a Bachelor’s degree in Khmer literature from RUPP in 2007. He was then hired by his alma mater to teach the subject while also teaching art history at the National Institute of Education (NIE).

Despite working full time and teaching at two different schools, Rangsey went on to earn his Master’s degree in linguistics from RUPP in 2009, which was what got him interested in the sort of work he’s known for doing today.

“Studying relentlessly can be really satisfying once you experience the results of it. It doesn’t matter what skill or knowledge exactly you’re trying to acquire – focused study is always the surest route to grasping and understanding it. The process is always the same: Sharpening your knowledge so that it can cut a clear path to achieving your desired goal,” the professor said.

From 2015-2018, Rangsey lived in the Yunnan province of China and taught Khmer at the Yunnan Minzu University. He enjoyed the experience greatly and found it refreshing to be teaching students for whom Khmer wasn’t a first language. The students must have enjoyed the class as well because he won the “Outstanding Foreign Faculty” award at the university that year.

He then returned to China again for another Khmer language teaching stint at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies from 2020 up until his recent return to the Kingdom.

Rangsey’s textbooks and guidebooks on the Khmer language include the Glossary of Khmer Vocabulary published in 2014 and the Dictionary of Khmer Nouns Parts One, Two and Three published in 2017/18/19.

After taking a break for a year, in 2021 he published the Dictionary of Khmer Nouns Part Four while also authoring the Glossary of Khmer Adjectives and Adverbs. Just this year in 2022 he published another work called the Glossary of Khmer Synonyms, written with a co-author.

One might wonder – why write dictionaries? What’s wrong with the existing reference volumes? A lot, according to Rangsey .

“In the past, my predecessors were good at following tradition but they were so good at it that they never added anything new and if they studied it in any close detail, well, they didn’t see fit to write any of that down for posterity.

“On top of that, their methods of data collection were confusing and lacked clear standards, while the identification of words can be unclear if it’s only based on what part of speech it’s found in.

“Basically, for each entry they would just put down the meaning of the word and give some examples of how to use it, but they did not clearly explain the use of those words in a technical sense from a linguistics standpoint, and my team does do that, we provide those links to theory. And that is why our dictionaries are the most comprehensive and accurate ones ever to be published for the Khmer language, at least in my opinion,” he said.

Rangsey continues to teach classes at RUPP and expand the series of reference books he’s been authoring with additional volumes and topics already in the works. His commitment to the Khmer language and his winning ways in the classroom have already earned him the education ministry’s Gold Medal for achievement and it seems likely that he’ll win many more awards before reaching his retirement given his strong work ethic and devotion to his principles.