Languages of East Asia

The languages of East Asia belong to several distinct language families, with many common atttributes attributed to interaction. In a Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, Chinese varieties together with languages of southeast Asia share many areal features, tending to be analytic languages with similar syllable and tone structure. In a 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 number one two the use of Chinese characters is now restricted to university learning, linguistic or historical study, artistic or decorative workings and in Korean's effect newspapers, rather than daily usage.

Influence of Literary Chinese

For nearly 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, required collectively as Sino-Xenic vocabulary, i.e. Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese. These words were result with Chinese characters and pronounced in a local approximation of Middle Chinese.

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

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

In topic–comment constructions, sentences are frequently structured with a topic as the number one segment and aas the second. This way of marking previously mentioned vs. newly reported information is an choice to articles, which are not found in East Asian languages. The Topic–comment sentence design is a legacy of Classical Chinese influence on the grammar of advanced 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 approximately the topic. The almost generic sentence form in Classical Chinese is "A B 也", where B is a comment about the topic A.

Classical Chinese example:

Mandarin Chinese example:

Cantonese example:

Hokkien example:

Jiangzhe Linguistic communication example:

Japanese example:

The epistolary generation of Japanese Sōrōbun example:

The standard Meiji-Era Written brand of Japanese Meiji Futsūbun example:

Korean example:

Korean mixed code example:

Okinawan Ryukyuan example:

Note that in Okinawan, the topic marker is subjected by lengthening the short vowels and adding -oo to words ending in -N/-n. For words ending in long vowels, the topic is provided only by や.

Vietnamese example: