East Asian languages
Encyclopedia
East Asian languages describe two notional groupings of languages in East
and Southeast
Asia
:
Although most of these languages are generally believed to be genetically unrelated, they share many areal features due to geographic proximity. This is also known as the East Asian sprachbund
.
Outside of China
itself, these coincide with the area where Literary Chinese was at one time used as the written language, and influenced the development of a national written language based on the previously unwritten local non-Chinese language. Chinese morphology
and word formation principles have been carried over into these languages, so that it is not uncommon for Chinese-style compound words to be coined in Japanese from originally Chinese morphemes, and then borrowed back into Chinese where they are used without Chinese speakers being aware of their Japanese origin.
Today, these words of Chinese origin may be written in the traditional Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), simplified Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese), a locally developed phonetic script (Korean hangul
, Japanese kana
), or a modified Latin alphabet
(Vietnamese alphabet
).
of unrelated languages:
s; phonemic tone
; a fairly large inventory of consonants, including phonemic aspiration
; few or no clusters at the beginning of a syllable, other than clusters ending in a glide consonant; and a small number of possible distinctions at the end of a syllable, including no clusters, no voice distinction and unreleased stop
s. All of the above features are characteristic of Chinese
, Vietnamese
, Thai
, Hmong
, and Standard Tibetan
, despite belonging to numerous different language families. All, in fact belong to unrelated families from all others except for Chinese and Tibetan, which belong to the different top-level branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Even in the case of Chinese and Tibetan, however, the above characteristics developed independently in the two languages. For example, Old Tibetan had none of the above features except for a relatively large consonant inventory including extremely marginal and recently developed phonemic aspiration. Old Chinese
had a mid-sized consonant inventory with phonemic aspiration, but none of the other characteristics.
Phonemic tone is one of the most well-known of East Asian language characterstics. Chinese and Vietnamese, as well as Burmese, Thai, Lao, Hmong, Standard Tibetan and some other languages of mainland Southeast Asia and South China are tonal languages. Korean, Japanese, and Austronesian languages do not have phonemic tone, though Japanese does have a pitch accent
(see Japanese pitch accent
), and Korean formerly had a three-way pitch accent
still present in some dialects. (Korean and Japanese are somewhat similar languages believed by some to belong to the same family; they share many features distinct from Sino-Tibetan and many other families.) Reconstruction of Vietnamese, Old Chinese
and ancient Tibetan
and Burmese
have suggested that these languages originally did not have phonemic tone, but later developed it; the process of tone development is known as tonogenesis. Only the Tai–Kadai languages and Hmong–Mien languages are reconstructed with ancestral tone, and those researchers who believe in the unity of the Austro-Tai languages
assert that tone was a secondary development in the Tai–Kadai languages as well.
Specifically, tones developed via cheshirisation
(as a remnant of lost consonant distinctions) – the loss of final consonants /ʔ/ and /s/ from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese
led to three tones in Middle Chinese, and then a tone split (see below) doubled the number to six tones, still preserved in some modern Chinese varieties such as Cantonese
. A similar process occurred in the other languages that developed tone.
The presence of largely monosyllabic morphemes is another well-known feature of East Asian languages. Monosyllabic morphemes do not always imply monosyllabic words; for example, Mandarin Chinese is rich in polysyllabic words. Some polysyllabic morphemes exist even in Old Chinese and Vietnamese, often loan words from other languages. A related syllable structure found in some languages, such as the Mon–Khmer languages, is the sesquisyllable, consisting of a stressed syllable with approximately the above structure, preceded by a simpler, unstressed syllable consisting only of a consonant, a schwa (/ə/, and possibly a nasal consonant
(usually homorganic to the following consonant). This structure is present in many conservative Mon–Khmer languages such as Khmer
(Cambodian), as well as in Burmese
, and is reconstructed for the older stages of a number of Sino-Tibetan languages
.
occurred in the majority of East Asian and Southeast Asian languages, typically happened c. 1000–1500 AD, in which a former distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants at the beginning of a syllable was lost, in the process transferring the former voicing distinction onto the syllabic nucleus (i.e. the following vowel). Generally, the loss of voicing led to either a tone split or a register split. Typically, voiced obstruent
s (stops and fricatives) became unvoiced, while unvoiced approximants became voiced.
Tonal languages generally developed a tone split by this process, in which the number of tones in the language doubled (generally from 3 tones to 6 tones). Examples of languages affected by this process are Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Lhasa Tibetan.
Many non-tonal languages instead developed a register split, with voiced consonants producing breathy-voiced
vowels and unvoiced consonants producing normally voiced
vowels. Often, the breathy-voiced vowels subsequently went through additional, complex changes (e.g. diphthongization). Examples of languages affected this way are Mon
and Khmer
(Cambodian). Breathy voicing has since been lost in standard Khmer, although the vowel changes triggered by it still remain.
Many of these languages have subsequently developed some voiced obstruents. The most common such sounds are /b/ and /d/ (often pronounced with some implosion), which result from former preglottalized /ʔb/ and /ʔd/, which were common phonemes in many Asian languages and which behaved like voiceless obstruents. In addition, Vietnamese developed voiced fricatives through a different process (specifically, in words consisting of two syllables, with an initial, unstressed minor syllable
, the medial stop at the beginning of the stressed major syllable turned into a voiced fricative, and then the minor syllable was lost).
Note that in Okinawan
, the topic marker is indicated by lengthening the short vowels and adding -oo to words ending in -N/-n. For words ending in long vowels, the topic is introduced only by や.
This way of marking previously mentioned vs. newly introduced information is an alternative to articles
, which are not found in East Asian languages. The Topic–comment sentence structure is a legacy of Classical Chinese influence on the grammar of modern East Asian languages; in Classical Chinese, the focus of the phrase (i.e. the topic) was often placed first, which was then followed by a statement about the topic. The most generic sentence form in Classical Chinese is "A B 也", where B is a comment about the topic A.
However, this is not especially the case for Vietnamese:
In this example, the topic regarding "today's dinner" does not form before the comment, and the same sentence structure found within the other examples is not maintained in Vietnamese syntax.
Some linguists also include Japonic
and Korean
in an Altaic
family. The Austric
hypothesis, based on morphology
and other resemblances, is that Austro-Asiatic
, Austronesian
, often Tai–Kadai, and sometimes Hmong–Mien form a genetic family. Other hypothetical groupings include the Sino-Austronesian languages
and Austro-Tai languages
. Long-range comparison linguists have hypothesized even larger macrofamilies
such as Dené–Caucasian, including Sino-Tibetan and Ket
.
Chinese scholars often group Tai–Kadai and Hmong–Mien with Sino-Tibetan
, which Western linguists view as composed only of Chinese
and Tibeto-Burman
.
East Asia
East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...
and Southeast
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
:
- Languages which have been greatly influenced by Classical ChineseClassical ChineseClassical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
and the Chinese writing system, in particular ChineseChinese languageThe Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, JapaneseJapanese languageis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, KoreanKorean languageKorean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
, and VietnameseVietnamese languageVietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
(also known as CJKCJKCJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which is used in the field of software and communications internationalization.The term CJKV means CJK plus Vietnamese, which constitute the main East Asian languages.- Characteristics :...
V). - The larger grouping of languages includes the CJKV area as well as other languages in several language groups of Southeast Asia including Sino-TibetanSino-Tibetan languagesThe Sino-Tibetan languages are a language family comprising, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers...
, Tai–Kadai, Mon–Khmer, and Hmong–Mien, as well as a small number of Austronesian languagesAustronesian languagesThe Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
. In the same geographic area but outside of this linguistic grouping are those languages to the east and south (most Austronesian languages), west (the South Asian languages, including the Indo-IranianIndo-Iranian languagesThe Indo-Iranian language group constitutes the easternmost extant branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It consists of three language groups: the Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Nuristani...
, MundaMunda languages-Anderson :Gregory Anderson's 1999 proposal is as follows. Individual languages are highlighted in italics.*North Munda **Korku**Kherwarian***Santhali***Mundari*South Munda **Kharia–Juang***Juang***Kharia...
, and DravidianDravidian languagesThe Dravidian language family includes approximately 85 genetically related languages, spoken by about 217 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and...
language families), and north (the Altaic languagesAltaic languagesAltaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
, including the TurkicTurkic languagesThe Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
, Mongolian and TungusicTungusic languagesThe Tungusic languages form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered, and the long-term future of the family is uncertain...
language families).
Although most of these languages are generally believed to be genetically unrelated, they share many areal features due to geographic proximity. This is also known as the East Asian sprachbund
Sprachbund
A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...
.
CJKV area
The CJKV area refers to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, the languages with large amounts of vocabulary of Chinese origin (i.e. Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, Sino-Vietnamese) and which are or were formerly written with Chinese characters. Because modern Vietnamese is no longer written with Chinese characters at all, it is sometimes left out of this grouping, in which case the area is just called CJK.Outside of China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
itself, these coincide with the area where Literary Chinese was at one time used as the written language, and influenced the development of a national written language based on the previously unwritten local non-Chinese language. Chinese morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
and word formation principles have been carried over into these languages, so that it is not uncommon for Chinese-style compound words to be coined in Japanese from originally Chinese morphemes, and then borrowed back into Chinese where they are used without Chinese speakers being aware of their Japanese origin.
Today, these words of Chinese origin may be written in the traditional Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), simplified Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese), a locally developed phonetic script (Korean hangul
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
, Japanese kana
Kana
Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as rōmaji...
), or a modified Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
(Vietnamese alphabet
Vietnamese alphabet
The Vietnamese alphabet, called Chữ Quốc Ngữ , usually shortened to Quốc Ngữ , is the modern writing system for the Vietnamese language...
).
Areal linguistic features
Several areal features partially coincide with or extend beyond the CJKV area, forming a sprachbundSprachbund
A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...
of unrelated languages:
Syllable structure, tone
Characteristic of many East Asian languages is a particular syllable structure involving monosyllabic morphemeMorpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s; phonemic tone
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
; a fairly large inventory of consonants, including phonemic aspiration
Aspiration (phonetics)
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ...
; few or no clusters at the beginning of a syllable, other than clusters ending in a glide consonant; and a small number of possible distinctions at the end of a syllable, including no clusters, no voice distinction and unreleased stop
Unreleased stop
An unreleased stop or unreleased plosive is a plosive consonant without an audible release burst. That is, the oral tract is blocked to pronounce the consonant, and there is no audible indication of when that occlusion ends...
s. All of the above features are characteristic of Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
, Thai
Thai language
Thai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
, Hmong
Hmong language
Hmong or Mong is the common name for a dialect continuum of the West Hmongic branch of the Hmong–Mien/Miao–Yao language family spoken by the Hmong people of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, northern Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos...
, and Standard Tibetan
Standard Tibetan
Standard Tibetan is the most widely used spoken form of the Tibetan languages. It is based on the speech of Lhasa, an Ü-Tsang dialect belonging to the Central Tibetan languages. For this reason, Standard Tibetan is often called Central Tibetan...
, despite belonging to numerous different language families. All, in fact belong to unrelated families from all others except for Chinese and Tibetan, which belong to the different top-level branches of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Even in the case of Chinese and Tibetan, however, the above characteristics developed independently in the two languages. For example, Old Tibetan had none of the above features except for a relatively large consonant inventory including extremely marginal and recently developed phonemic aspiration. Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
had a mid-sized consonant inventory with phonemic aspiration, but none of the other characteristics.
Phonemic tone is one of the most well-known of East Asian language characterstics. Chinese and Vietnamese, as well as Burmese, Thai, Lao, Hmong, Standard Tibetan and some other languages of mainland Southeast Asia and South China are tonal languages. Korean, Japanese, and Austronesian languages do not have phonemic tone, though Japanese does have a pitch accent
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
(see Japanese pitch accent
Japanese pitch accent
Japanese pitch accent is a feature of the Japanese language which distinguishes words in most Japanese dialects, though the nature and location of the accent for a given word may vary between dialects...
), and Korean formerly had a three-way pitch accent
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
still present in some dialects. (Korean and Japanese are somewhat similar languages believed by some to belong to the same family; they share many features distinct from Sino-Tibetan and many other families.) Reconstruction of Vietnamese, Old Chinese
Old Chinese
The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....
and ancient Tibetan
Tibetan language
The Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually-unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...
and Burmese
Burmese language
The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese. Burmese is the native language of the Bamar and related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar, as well as...
have suggested that these languages originally did not have phonemic tone, but later developed it; the process of tone development is known as tonogenesis. Only the Tai–Kadai languages and Hmong–Mien languages are reconstructed with ancestral tone, and those researchers who believe in the unity of the Austro-Tai languages
Austro-Tai languages
Austro-Tai is a hypothesis that the Tai–Kadai and Austronesian language families of southern China and the Pacific are genealogically related. Related proposals include Austric and Sino-Austronesian .-Origins:...
assert that tone was a secondary development in the Tai–Kadai languages as well.
Specifically, tones developed via cheshirisation
Cheshirisation
Cheshirisation, or cheshirization, is a term coined by James Matisoff to refer to a type of sound change where a trace remains of a sound that has otherwise disappeared from a word. The term is a neologism, i.e. it is not an established scientific term. It is used here to describe a process that...
(as a remnant of lost consonant distinctions) – the loss of final consonants /ʔ/ and /s/ from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , also called Ancient Chinese by the linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
led to three tones in Middle Chinese, and then a tone split (see below) doubled the number to six tones, still preserved in some modern Chinese varieties such as Cantonese
Cantonese
Cantonese is a dialect spoken primarily in south China.Cantonese may also refer to:* Yue Chinese, the Chinese language that includes Cantonese* Cantonese cuisine, the cuisine of Guangdong province...
. A similar process occurred in the other languages that developed tone.
The presence of largely monosyllabic morphemes is another well-known feature of East Asian languages. Monosyllabic morphemes do not always imply monosyllabic words; for example, Mandarin Chinese is rich in polysyllabic words. Some polysyllabic morphemes exist even in Old Chinese and Vietnamese, often loan words from other languages. A related syllable structure found in some languages, such as the Mon–Khmer languages, is the sesquisyllable, consisting of a stressed syllable with approximately the above structure, preceded by a simpler, unstressed syllable consisting only of a consonant, a schwa (/ə/, and possibly a nasal consonant
Nasal consonant
A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...
(usually homorganic to the following consonant). This structure is present in many conservative Mon–Khmer languages such as Khmer
Khmer language
Khmer , or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language , with speakers in the tens of millions. Khmer has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious...
(Cambodian), as well as in Burmese
Burmese language
The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese. Burmese is the native language of the Bamar and related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar, as well as...
, and is reconstructed for the older stages of a number of Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan languages
The Sino-Tibetan languages are a language family comprising, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers...
.
Loss of voicing with tone or register split
A characteristic sound changeSound change
Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
occurred in the majority of East Asian and Southeast Asian languages, typically happened c. 1000–1500 AD, in which a former distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants at the beginning of a syllable was lost, in the process transferring the former voicing distinction onto the syllabic nucleus (i.e. the following vowel). Generally, the loss of voicing led to either a tone split or a register split. Typically, voiced obstruent
Obstruent
An obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract, such as [k], [d͡ʒ] and [f]. In phonetics, articulation may be divided into two large classes: obstruents and sonorants....
s (stops and fricatives) became unvoiced, while unvoiced approximants became voiced.
Tonal languages generally developed a tone split by this process, in which the number of tones in the language doubled (generally from 3 tones to 6 tones). Examples of languages affected by this process are Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Lhasa Tibetan.
Many non-tonal languages instead developed a register split, with voiced consonants producing breathy-voiced
Breathy voice
Breathy voice is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal voicing, but are held further apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes between them. This produces an audible noise...
vowels and unvoiced consonants producing normally voiced
Modal voice
Modal voice is the vocal register used most frequently in speech and singing in most languages. It is also the term used in linguistics for the most common phonation of vowels...
vowels. Often, the breathy-voiced vowels subsequently went through additional, complex changes (e.g. diphthongization). Examples of languages affected this way are Mon
Mon language
The Mon language is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mon, who live in Burma and Thailand. Mon, like the related language Cambodian—but unlike most languages in Mainland Southeast Asia—is not tonal. Mon is spoken by more than a million people today. In recent years, usage of Mon has...
and Khmer
Khmer language
Khmer , or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language , with speakers in the tens of millions. Khmer has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious...
(Cambodian). Breathy voicing has since been lost in standard Khmer, although the vowel changes triggered by it still remain.
Many of these languages have subsequently developed some voiced obstruents. The most common such sounds are /b/ and /d/ (often pronounced with some implosion), which result from former preglottalized /ʔb/ and /ʔd/, which were common phonemes in many Asian languages and which behaved like voiceless obstruents. In addition, Vietnamese developed voiced fricatives through a different process (specifically, in words consisting of two syllables, with an initial, unstressed minor syllable
Minor syllable
Minor syllable is a term used primarily in the description of Mon-Khmer languages, where a word typically consists of a reduced syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable...
, the medial stop at the beginning of the stressed major syllable turned into a voiced fricative, and then the minor syllable was lost).
Morphology
- Analytic structure
- Chinese and languages of Southeast Asia are highly analytic languages. Words are not obligatorily marked or inflectedInflectionIn grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
for genderGrammatical genderGrammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
, numberGrammatical numberIn linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
, personGrammatical personGrammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
, caseGrammatical caseIn grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
, tenseGrammatical tenseA tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
, or moodGrammatical moodIn linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
. Instead, these properties can optionally be indicated by adding independent, invariant modifier words and particlesGrammatical particleIn grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
that are sometimes not even bound morphemeBound morphemeIn morphology, a bound morpheme is a morpheme that only appears as part of a larger word; a free morpheme is one that can stand alone.Affixes are always bound. English language affixes are either prefixes or suffixes. E.g., -ment in "shipment" and pre- in "prefix"...
s. - Japanese verbsJapanese verb conjugationsThis is a list of Japanese verb and adjective conjugations. Almost all of these are regular, but the conjugations of the very few irregular verbs are also listed. Japanese verb conjugation is the same for all subjects, first person , second person and third person , singular and plural. The plain...
and Korean verbs do have suffixes for properties of the verb itself like aspect, mood, and tense, similar to those of the Altaic languagesAltaic languagesAltaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
further north, but agree with Chinese and Southeast Asian languages in not marking gender, number, or any other properties of the verb argumentVerb argumentIn linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
s on the verb itself. (not head-marking)
- Chinese and languages of Southeast Asia are highly analytic languages. Words are not obligatorily marked or inflected
- Classifiers/measure words
- Languages of both the CJKV area and both mainland and island Southeast Asia typically have a well-developed system of measure wordMeasure wordIn linguistics, measure words are words that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of some noun. They denote a unit or measurement and are used with nouns that are not countable. For instance, in English, is a mass noun and thus one cannot say *"three muds", but one can say...
s or numerical classifierClassifier (linguistics)A classifier, in linguistics, sometimes called a measure word, is a word or morpheme used in some languages to classify the referent of a countable noun according to its meaning. In languages that have classifiers, they are often used when the noun is being counted or specified...
s. (The relationship between nouns and their classifiers is, atypically, a way that East Asian languages require more agreement and are less analytic than most other languages.) - The Bengali languageBengali languageBengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...
just to the west of Southeast Asia has numerical classifiers, even though it is an Indo-European language which does not share the other features discussed in this article. Bengali also lacks genderGrammatical genderGrammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
, unlike most Indo-European languagesIndo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
. - The other areas of the world where numerical classifier systems are common in indigenous languages are the western parts of North and South America, so that numerical classifiers could even be seen as a pan-Pacific RimPacific RimThe Pacific Rim refers to places around the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The term "Pacific Basin" includes the Pacific Rim and islands in the Pacific Ocean...
areal feature. However, similar noun class systems are also found among most Sub-Saharan African languagesAfrican languagesThere are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
.
- Languages of both the CJKV area and both mainland and island Southeast Asia typically have a well-developed system of measure word
Syntax
- Topic–comment constructionsTopic-prominent languageA topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its syntax to emphasize the topic–comment structure of the sentence. The term is best known in American linguistics from Charles N...
, in which sentences are frequently structured with a topic as the first segment and a comment as the second.
-
- Mandarin Chinese example:
| 今天 | 的 | 晚飯 | 我 | 已經 | 吃過 | 了。 | |
| 今天 | 的 | 晚饭 | 我 | 已经 | 吃过 | 了。 | |
| Transcription: | Jīntiān | de | wǎnfàn | wǒ | yǐjīng | chīguò | le. |
| Gloss: | today | GENITIVE | dinner | I | already | eat-EXPERIENCE | NEWSTATE |
| Translation: | I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: I've already eaten.) | ||||||
-
- Cantonese example:
| 今日 | 嘅 | 晚飯 | 我 | 已經 | 食咗 | 喇。 | |
| Transcription: | Gam1yat6 | ge3 | maan5faan6 | ngo5 | ji3ging1 | sik6zo2 | la3 |
| Gloss: | today | GENITIVE | dinner | I | already | eat-EXPERIENCE | NEWSTATE |
| Translation: | I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: I've already eaten.) | ||||||
-
- Taiwanese Hokkien example:
| 今仔日 | ㄟ | 暗飯 | 我 | 已經 | 食過 | 矣。 | |
| Transcription: | Kin-á-ji̍t | ê | àm-pn̄g | góa | í-king | chia̍h-kuè | ah |
| Gloss: | today | GENITIVE | dinner | I | already | eat-EXPERIENCE | NEWSTATE |
| Translation: | I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: I've already eaten.) | ||||||
-
- Japanese example:
| 今日 | の | 晩御飯 | は | もう | 食べた。 | |
| Transcription: | Kyō | no | bangohan | wa | mō | tabeta. |
| Gloss: | today | GENITIVE | dinner | TOPIC | already | eat-PERFECTIVE |
| Translation: | I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: already eaten.) | |||||
-
- Okinawan Ryukyuan example:
| 今日 | ぬ | 夕御飯ー | なー | 噛だん。 | ||
| Transcription: | Chuu | nu | yuu'ubanoo | naa | kadan. | |
| Gloss: | today | GENITIVE | dinner-TOPIC | already | eat-PERFECTIVE | |
| Translation: | I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: already eaten.) | |||||
Note that in Okinawan
Okinawan language
Central Okinawan, or simply Okinawan , is a Northern Ryukyuan language spoken primarily in the southern half of the island of Okinawa, as well as in the surrounding islands of Kerama, Kumejima, Tonaki, Aguni, and a number of smaller peripheral islands...
, the topic marker is indicated by lengthening the short vowels and adding -oo to words ending in -N/-n. For words ending in long vowels, the topic is introduced only by や.
-
- Korean example:
| 오늘 | 의 | 저녁밥 | 은 | 이미 | 먹었다. | |
| Transcription: | Oneul | ui | jeonyeokbab | eun | imi | meok-eotda. |
| Gloss: | today | GENITIVE | dinner | TOPIC | already | eat-PERFECTIVE |
| Translation: | I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: already eaten.) | |||||
This way of marking previously mentioned vs. newly introduced information is an alternative to articles
Article (grammar)
An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
, which are not found in East Asian languages. The Topic–comment sentence structure is a legacy of Classical Chinese influence on the grammar of modern East Asian languages; in Classical Chinese, the focus of the phrase (i.e. the topic) was often placed first, which was then followed by a statement about the topic. The most generic sentence form in Classical Chinese is "A B 也", where B is a comment about the topic A.
-
- Classical Chinese example:
| 今 | 之 | 飱 | 吾 | 已 | 食 | 也。 | |
| Gloss: | today | GENITIVE | dinner | I | already | eat | AFFIRMATIVE |
| Translation: | I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: I've already eaten.) | ||||||
However, this is not especially the case for Vietnamese:
-
- Vietnamese example:
| Hán-Nôm: | 𪝬 | 吔 | 𩛖𩛷 | 𩛖啐 | 𣋚𠉞。 | |
| Quốc Ngữ: | Tôi | đã | ăn bữa | ăn tối | hôm nay. | |
| Gloss: | I | already | eat-PERFECTIVE | dinner | today | |
| Translation: | I've already eaten today's dinner. | |||||
In this example, the topic regarding "today's dinner" does not form before the comment, and the same sentence structure found within the other examples is not maintained in Vietnamese syntax.
Pronouns
- Personal pronounPersonal pronounPersonal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...
s in many of the region's languages including Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Malay/Indonesian are open class words rather than closed class words: they are not stable over time, not few in number, and not cliticCliticIn morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
s whose use is obligatory in grammatical constructs. New personal pronouns or forms of reference or address can and often do evolve from nouns as fresh ways of expressing respect or social status. Another way of viewing this phenomenon is that these languages do not have personal pronouns in the Western sense.- Chinese pronounsChinese pronounsChinese pronouns differ somewhat from their English counterparts. For instance, there is no differentiation between "he", "she" and "it", though a written difference was introduced after contact with the West, and with the exception of the reflexive self, pronouns remain the same whether they are...
are partly an exception; the 1st/2nd/3rd person pronouns ngo5/wǒ, nei5/nĭ, and taa1/tā that are most used today can be traced back thousands of years to Proto-Sino-Tibetan and are used to refer to all sorts of people, even more so since the decay of traditional respect/politeness languageChinese honorificsChinese honorifics were developed due to class consciousness and Confucian principles of order and respect in Ancient and Imperial China. The Chinese polite language also affects Japanese honorifics conceptually; both emphasized the idea of classes and in-group vs. out-group. So the language used...
. Many of the personal pronouns historically used in Literary Chinese are obsolete in Modern ChineseModern ChineseModern Chinese can refer to the following:*Modern Chinese history*Any or all of the modern varieties of Chinese, most commonly**Standard Chinese or Modern Chinese, sometimes known as Mandarin, the national language of the People's Republic of China...
.
- Chinese pronouns
Politeness
- Linguistic systems of politenessPolitenessPoliteness is best expressed as the practical application of good manners or etiquette. It is a culturally-defined phenomenon, and therefore what is considered polite in one culture can sometimes be quite rude or simply eccentric in another cultural context....
, including frequent use of honorificHonorificAn honorific is a word or expression with connotations conveying esteem or respect when used in addressing or referring to a person. Sometimes, the term is used not quite correctly to refer to an honorary title...
s, with varying levels of politeness or respect, are well-developed in JavaneseJavanese languageJavanese language is the language of the Javanese people from the central and eastern parts of the island of Java, in Indonesia. In addition, there are also some pockets of Javanese speakers in the northern coast of western Java...
, Japanese and Korean. Politeness systems in Chinese are relatively weak, having devolved from a more developed systemChinese honorificsChinese honorifics were developed due to class consciousness and Confucian principles of order and respect in Ancient and Imperial China. The Chinese polite language also affects Japanese honorifics conceptually; both emphasized the idea of classes and in-group vs. out-group. So the language used...
into a much less predominant role in modern Chinese. This is especially true when speaking of the southern Chinese languages. However, Vietnamese has retained a highly complex system of pronouns, in which the terms mostly derive from Chinese. For example, bác, chú, dượng, and cậu are all terms ultimately derived from Chinese and all refer to different statuses of "uncle".- With modernization and other trends, politeness language is evolving to be simpler. Avoiding the need for complex polite language can also motivate use in some situations of languages like Indonesian or English that have less complex respect systems or are more egalitarian.
Linguistic relationships
These features strongly contrast with major language groups bordering East and Southeast Asia. The languages of East and Southeast Asia are classified into multiple language families, many of whose validity continues to be debated:Some linguists also include Japonic
Japonic languages
Japonic languages is a term which identifies and characterises the Japanese which is spoken on the main islands of Japan and the Ryukyuan languages spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. This widely accepted linguistics term was coined by Leon Serafim....
and Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
in an Altaic
Altaic languages
Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
family. The Austric
Austric languages
The Austric language superfamily is a large hypothetical grouping of languages primarily spoken in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the eastern Indian subcontinent. It includes the Austronesian language family of Taiwan, the Malay Archipelago, Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, as well as the...
hypothesis, based on morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
and other resemblances, is that Austro-Asiatic
Austro-Asiatic languages
The Austro-Asiatic languages, in recent classifications synonymous with Mon–Khmer, are a large language family of Southeast Asia, also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh. The name Austro-Asiatic comes from the Latin words for "south" and "Asia", hence "South Asia"...
, Austronesian
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...
, often Tai–Kadai, and sometimes Hmong–Mien form a genetic family. Other hypothetical groupings include the Sino-Austronesian languages
Sino-Austronesian languages
-See also:*Classification schemes for Southeast Asian languages*Austric languages*Austro-Tai languages*Dené–Caucasian languages*Austronesian languages*Sino-Tibetan languages*Old Chinese language*Tibeto-Burman languages*Haplogroup O *Languages of China...
and Austro-Tai languages
Austro-Tai languages
Austro-Tai is a hypothesis that the Tai–Kadai and Austronesian language families of southern China and the Pacific are genealogically related. Related proposals include Austric and Sino-Austronesian .-Origins:...
. Long-range comparison linguists have hypothesized even larger macrofamilies
Macrofamily
In historical linguistics, a macro-family, also called a superfamily or phylum, is defined as a proposed genetic relationship grouping together language families in a larger scale clasification.However, Campbell regards this term as superfluous, preferring language family for those clasifications...
such as Dené–Caucasian, including Sino-Tibetan and Ket
Ket
Ket can also refer to:*Ket people, a people of Siberia*Ket language, the language of the Ket people*Ket River, a river in Siberia*Keť, a village in south-west Slovakia...
.
Chinese scholars often group Tai–Kadai and Hmong–Mien with Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan languages
The Sino-Tibetan languages are a language family comprising, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers...
, which Western linguists view as composed only of Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
and Tibeto-Burman
Tibeto-Burman languages
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Chinese members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken thoughout the highlands of southeast Asia, as well as lowland areas in Burma ....
.
See also
- Classification schemes for Southeast Asian languagesClassification schemes for Southeast Asian languagesBelow is a list of different classification schemes for Southeast Asian languages. Language families represented include:*Tai–Kadai*Austronesian*Austro-Asiatic*Hmong–Mien*Sino-Tibetan-Macrofamilies:...
- East AsiaEast AsiaEast Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...
- Southeast AsiaSoutheast AsiaSoutheast Asia, South-East Asia, South East Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India, west of New Guinea and north of Australia. The region lies on the intersection of geological plates, with heavy seismic...
- EALCEALCIn American universities, EALC refers to East Asian Languages and Civilizations , and is the term for the department of East Asian studies, which studies this region of the world....