Languages of East Asia

Last updated

The languages of East Asia belong to several distinct language families, with many common features attributed to interaction. In the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, Chinese varieties and languages of southeast Asia share many areal features, tending to be analytic languages with similar syllable and tone structure. In the 1st millennium AD, Chinese culture came to dominate East Asia, and Classical Chinese was adopted by scholars and ruling classes in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. As a consequence, there was a massive influx of loanwords from Chinese vocabulary into these and other neighboring Asian languages. The Chinese script was also adapted to write Vietnamese (as Chữ Nôm), Korean (as Hanja) and Japanese (as Kanji), though in the first two the use of Chinese characters is now restricted to university learning, linguistic or historical study, artistic or decorative works and (in Korean's case) newspapers, rather than daily usage.

Contents

Language families

The Austroasiatic languages include Vietnamese and Khmer, as well as many other languages spoken in areas scattered as far afield as Malaya (Aslian) and central India (Korku), often in isolated pockets surrounded by the ranges of other language groups. Most linguists believe that Austroasiatic languages once ranged continuously across southeast Asia and that their scattered distribution today is the result of the subsequent arrival of other language groups. [1]

One of these groups were the Tai–Kadai languages such as Thai, Lao and Shan. These languages were originally spoken in southern China, where the greatest diversity within the family is still found, and possibly as far north as the Yangtze valley. As Chinese civilization expanded southward from the North China Plain, many Tai–Kadai speakers became sinicized, while others were displaced to Southeast Asia. With the exception of Zhuang, most of the Tai–Kadai languages still remaining in China are spoken in isolated upland areas. [2]

The Miao–Yao or Hmong–Mien languages also originated in southern China, where they are now spoken only in isolated hill regions. Many Hmong–Mien speakers were displaced into Southeast Asia during the Qing Dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries, triggered by the suppression of a series of revolts in Guizhou. [3]

The Austronesian languages are believed to have spread from Taiwan to the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as some areas of mainland southeast Asia. [4]

The varieties of Chinese are usually included in the Sino-Tibetan family, which also includes Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Tibet, southwest China, northeast India, Burma and neighbouring countries.

To the north are the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, which some linguists had grouped as an Altaic family, sometimes also including the Korean and Japonic languages, but is now seen as a discredited theory and is no longer supported by specialists in these languages. [5] The languages tend to be atonal, polysyllabic and agglutinative, with subject–object–verb word order and some degree of vowel harmony. [6] Critics of the Altaic hypothesis attribute the similarities to intense language contact between the languages that occurred sometime in pre-history. [7]

Chinese scholars often group Tai–Kadai and Hmong–Mien with Sino-Tibetan, but Western scholarship since the Second World War has considered them as separate families. Some larger groupings have been proposed, but are not widely supported. The Austric hypothesis, based on morphology and other resemblances, is that Austroasiatic, Austronesian, often Tai–Kadai, and sometimes Hmong–Mien form a genetic family. Other hypothetical groupings include the Sino-Austronesian languages and Austro-Tai languages. Linguists undergoing long-range comparison have hypothesized even larger macrofamilies such as Dené–Caucasian, including Sino-Tibetan and Ket.

Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area

The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area stretches from Thailand to China and is home to speakers of languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Tai-Kadai, Austronesian (represented by Chamic) and Austroasiatic families. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. [8]

Characteristic of many MSEA languages is a particular syllable structure involving monosyllabic morphemes, lexical tone, a fairly large inventory of consonants, including phonemic aspiration, limited clusters at the beginning of a syllable, plentiful vowel contrasts and relatively few final consonants. Languages in the northern part of the area generally have fewer vowel and final contrasts but more initial contrasts. [9]

A well-known feature is the similar tone systems in Chinese, Hmong–Mien, Tai languages and Vietnamese. Most of these languages passed through an earlier stage with three tones on most syllables (apart from checked syllables ending in a stop consonant), which was followed by a tone split where the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants disappeared but in compensation the number of tones doubled. These parallels led to confusion over the classification of these languages, until Haudricourt showed in 1954 that tone was not an invariant feature, by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other languages of the Mon–Khmer family, and proposed that tone in the other languages had a similar origin. [10]

MSEA languages tend to have monosyllabic morphemes, though there are exceptions. [11] Most MSEA languages are very analytic, with no inflection and little derivational morphology. Grammatical relations are typically signalled by word order, particles and coverbs or adpositions. Modality is expressed using sentence-final particles. The usual word order in MSEA languages is subject–verb–object. Chinese and Karen are thought to have changed to this order from the subject–object–verb order retained by most other Sino-Tibetan languages. The order of constituents within a noun phrase varies: noun–modifier order is usual in Tai languages, Vietnamese and Miao, while in Chinese varieties and Yao most modifiers are placed before the noun. [12] [13] Topic-comment organization is also common. [14]

Languages of both eastern and southeast Asia typically have well-developed systems of numeral classifiers. [15] 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 Rim areal feature. [16] However, similar noun class systems are also found among most Sub-Saharan African languages.

Influence of Literary Chinese

For most of the pre-modern period, Chinese culture dominated East Asia. Scholars in Vietnam, Korea and Japan wrote in Literary Chinese and were thoroughly familiar with the Chinese classics. Their languages absorbed large numbers of Chinese words, known collectively as Sino-Xenic vocabulary, i.e. Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese. These words were written with Chinese characters and pronounced in a local approximation of Middle Chinese. [17]

Today, these words of Chinese origin may be written in the traditional Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), simplified Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese), a locally developed phonetic script (Korean hangul, Japanese kana), or a Latin alphabet (Vietnamese). The Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages are collectively referred to as CJKV, or just CJK, since modern Vietnamese is no longer written with Chinese characters at all.

In a similar way to the use of Latin and ancient Greek roots in English, the morphemes of Classical Chinese have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts. [18] These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. [19]

Topic–comment constructions

In topic–comment constructions, sentences are frequently structured with a topic as the first segment and a comment as the second. 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.

Chinese
Japanese
Korean
Ryukyuan

Okinawan Ryukyuan example:

今日ぬ夕御飯ーなー噛だん。
Transcription:Chuunuyuu'ubanoonaakadan.
Gloss:todayGENITIVEdinner-TOPICalreadyeat-PERFECTIVE
Translation:I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: already eaten.)

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.

Vietnamese

Vietnamese example:

Hôm naytôiđãănbữa ăn tối.
Chữ Nôm:𣋚𠉞碎吔𩛖𩛷𩛖啐。
Gloss:todayIalreadyeatdinner
Translation:I've already eaten today's dinner.

Politeness systems

Linguistic systems of politeness, including frequent use of honorific titles, with varying levels of politeness or respect, are well-developed in Japanese and Korean. Politeness systems in Chinese are relatively weak, having simplified from a more developed system into a much less predominant role in modern Chinese. [20] This is especially true when speaking of the southern Chinese varieties. 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".

In many of the region's languages, including Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Malay/Indonesian, 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. Thus personal pronouns are open class words rather than closed class words: they are not stable over time, not few in number, and not clitics whose use is obligatory in grammatical constructs. In addition to Korean honorifics that indicate politeness toward the subject of the speech, Korean speech levels indicate a level of politeness and familiarity directed toward the audience.

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.[ citation needed ]

Distribution maps

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austroasiatic languages</span> Language family concentrated in Southeast Asia

The Austroasiatic languages are a large language family spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority populations scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China. Approximately 117 million people speak an Austroasiatic language, of which more than two-thirds are Vietnamese speakers. Of the Austroasiatic languages, only Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon have lengthy, established presences in the historical record. Only two are presently considered to be the national languages of sovereign states: Vietnamese in Vietnam, and Khmer in Cambodia. The Mon language is a recognized indigenous language in Myanmar and Thailand, while the Wa language is a "recognized national language" in the de facto autonomous Wa State within Myanmar. Santali is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The remainder of the family's languages are spoken by minority groups and have no official status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kra–Dai languages</span> Language family of mainland Southeast Asia

The Kra–Dai languages, are a language family in mainland Southeast Asia, southern China, and northeastern India. All languages in the family are tonal, including Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos, respectively. Around 93 million people speak Kra–Dai languages; 60% of those speak Thai. Ethnologue lists 95 languages in the family, with 62 of these being in the Tai branch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vietnamese language</span> Austroasiatic spoken language

Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the national and official language. Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 85 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a second or first language for other ethnic groups in Vietnam, and still used by Vietnamese diaspora in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Languages of Asia</span>

Asia is home to hundreds of languages comprising several families and some unrelated isolates. The most spoken language families on the continent include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Japonic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan, Kra–Dai and Koreanic. Many languages of Asia, such as Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Tamil or Telugu, have a long history as a written language.

A sprachbund, also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The languages may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related, but the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hmong–Mien languages</span> Language family of south China and Southeast Asia

The Hmong–Mien languages are a highly tonal language family of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including Guizhou, Hunan, Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, Guangdong and Hubei provinces; the speakers of these languages are predominantly "hill people", in contrast to the neighboring Han Chinese, who have settled the more fertile river valleys.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austric languages</span> Hypothetical parent family of the Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages

The Austric languages are a proposed language family that includes the Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, as well as Kra–Dai and Austroasiatic languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. A genetic relationship between these language families is seen as plausible by some scholars, but remains unproven.

Indosphere is a term coined by the linguist James Matisoff for areas of Indian linguistic influence in the neighboring Southern Asian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian regions. It is commonly used in areal linguistics in contrast with the Sinophone languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area of the Sinosphere. Notably, unlike terms such as Lusophone or Francophone that refer to the multinational spread and influence of a single language with multiple dialects, this term refers to all languages that are considered to originate in India, of which there are 22 recognised languages alone across several major language families, including Indo-European and Dravidian. It considers these collectively in regards to the influence of these languages on the languages of other countries, rather than from the perspective of the spread of the language only.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peopling of Thailand</span>

The peopling of Thailand refers to the process by which the ethnic groups that comprise the population of present-day Thailand came to inhabit the region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austro-Tai languages</span> Proposed language family

The Austro-Tai languages, sometimes also Austro-Thai languages, are a proposed language family that comprises the Austronesian languages and Kra–Dai languages.

Primarily in Austroasiatic languages, in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor) syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or, with a reduced vowel, as in colloquial Khmer, or of the form with no vowel at all, as in Mlabri 'navel' and 'underneath', and Khasi kyndon 'rule', syrwet 'sign', kylla 'transform', symboh 'seed' and tyngkai 'conserve'.

Sino-Austronesian or Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian is a proposed language family suggested by Laurent Sagart in 1990. Using reconstructions of Old Chinese, Sagart argued that the Austronesian languages are related to the Sinitic languages phonologically, lexically and morphologically. Sagart later accepted the Sino-Tibetan languages as a valid group and extended his proposal to include the rest of Sino-Tibetan. He also placed the Tai–Kadai languages within the Austronesian family as a sister branch of Malayo-Polynesian. The proposal has been largely rejected by other linguists who argue that the similarities between Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan more likely arose from contact rather than being genetic.

Proto-Tai is the reconstructed proto-language of all the Tai languages, including modern Lao, Shan, Tai Lü, Tai Dam, Ahom, Northern Thai, Standard Thai, Bouyei, and Zhuang. The Proto-Tai language is not directly attested by any surviving texts, but has been reconstructed using the comparative method.

There have been various classification schemes for Southeast Asian languages.

Proto-Hmong–Mien (PHM), also known as Proto-Miao–Yao, is the reconstructed ancestor of the Hmong–Mien languages. Lower-level reconstructions include Proto-Hmongic and Proto-Mienic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area</span> Geolinguistic region sharing areal features such as tonality

The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien, Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. James Matisoff referred to this area as the "Sinosphere", contrasted with the "Indosphere", but viewed it as a zone of mutual influence in the ancient period.

The East Asian languages are a language family proposed by Stanley Starosta in 2001. The proposal has since been adopted by George van Driem and others.

Proto-Kra–Dai is the proposed reconstructed ancestor of the Kra–Dai languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ilia Peiros</span> Russian linguist (born 1948)

Ilia Peiros is a Russian linguist who specializes in the historical linguistics of East Asia. Peiros is a well-known scholar in the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics, known for its work on long-range comparative linguistics. Peiros is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, United States and was also a former faculty member at the University of Melbourne.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Old Yue language</span> Ancient language of China

The Old Yue language is an unattested, unclassified language, or group(s) of various languages, spoken in ancient southern China, and northern Vietnam circa 700 BCE or later. It can refer to Yue, which was spoken in the realm of Yue during the Spring and Autumn period. It can also refer to the different languages spoken by the Baiyue. Possible languages spoken by them may have been of Kra–Dai, Hmong–Mien, Austronesian, Austroasiatic and other origins.

References

Citations

  1. ↑ Sidwell & Blench (2011), pp. 339–340.
  2. ↑ Ramsey (1987), p. 233.
  3. ↑ Ramsey (1987), pp. 278–279.
  4. ↑ Diamond (2000).
  5. ↑ "While 'Altaic' is repeated in encyclopedias and handbooks most specialists in these languages no longer believe that the three traditional supposed Altaic groups, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic, are related." Lyle Campbell & Mauricio J. Mixco, A Glossary of Historical Linguistics (2007, University of Utah Press), pg. 7.
  6. ↑ Norman (1988), p. 6.
  7. ↑ Schönig (2003), p. 403.
  8. ↑ Enfield (2005), pp. 182–184.
  9. ↑ Enfield (2005), pp. 186–187.
  10. ↑ Norman (1988), pp. 53–56.
  11. ↑ Enfield (2005), p. 186.
  12. ↑ Enfield (2005), pp. 187–190.
  13. ↑ Ramsey (1987), p. 280.
  14. ↑ Enfield (2005), pp. 189–190.
  15. ↑ Enfield (2005), p. 189.
  16. ↑ Nichols (1992), pp. 131–133.
  17. ↑ Miyake (2004), p. 99.
  18. ↑ Shibatani (1990), p. 146.
  19. ↑ Wilkinson (2000), p. 43.
  20. ↑ "KCTOS 2007: What Happened to the Honorifics?". inst.at. Retrieved 2022-11-14.

Sources cited

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.