Languages of East Asia

The languages of East Asia belong to several distinct language families, with numerous common assigns attributed to interaction. In a Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, Chinese varieties as living as languages of southeast Asia share numerous areal features, tending to be analytic languages with similar syllable as well as tone structure. In the 1st millennium AD, Chinese culture came to dominate East Asia, & 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 ownership 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.

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 score spread by diffusion.

Characteristic of many MSEA languages is a specific syllable cut 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 fewconsonants. Languages in the northern part of the area broadly have fewer vowel andcontrasts but more initial contrasts.

A well-known feature is the similar tone systems in Chinese, Hmong–Mien, Tai languages and Vietnamese. nearly of these languages passed through an earlier stage with three tones on near syllables except 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 manner of these languages, until Haudricourt showed in 1954 that tone was not an invariant feature, by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded tofinal consonants in other languages of the Mon–Khmer family, and delivered that tone in the other languages had a similar origin.

MSEA languages tend to have monosyllabic morphemes, though there are exceptions. 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 lines 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 ago the noun. Topic-comment agency is also common.

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