East Asian languages

East Asian languages describe two notional groupings of languages in East and Southeast Asia:

• Languages which have been greatly influenced by Classical Chinese and the Chinese writing system, in particular Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (also known as CJKV).
• The larger grouping of languages includes the CJKV area as well as other languages in several language groups of Southeast Asia including Sino-Tibetan, Tai–Kadai, Mon–Khmer, and Hmong–Mien, as well as a small number of Austronesian languages. 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-Iranian, Munda, and Dravidian language families), and north (the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic 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.

CJKV area

Main article: CJK

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 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 Latin alphabet (Vietnamese).

Areal linguistic features

Several areal features partially coincide with or extend beyond the CJKV area, forming a sprachbund of unrelated languages:

Syllable structure, tone

Characteristic of many East Asian languages is a particular syllable structure involving monosyllabic morphemes; 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 stops. 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 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.

Loss of voicing with tone or register split

A characteristic sound change (a phonemic split) occurred in the majority of East Asian and Southeast Asian languages, typically happening 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 obstruents (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).

Other Characteristics

Morphology

• Analytic structure
  • Chinese and languages of Southeast Asia are highly analytic languages. Words are not obligatorily marked or inflected for gender, number, person, case, tense, or mood. Instead, these properties can optionally be indicated by adding independent, invariant modifier words and particles that are sometimes not even bound morphemes.
  • Japanese verbs and Korean verbs do have suffixes for properties of the verb itself like aspect, mood, and tense, similar to those of the Turkic and Mongolic languages further north, but agree with Chinese and Southeast Asian languages in not marking gender, number, or any other properties of the verb arguments on the verb itself. (not head-marking)
• Classifiers/measure words
  • Languages of both the CJKV area and both mainland and island Southeast Asia typically have a well-developed system of measure words or numerical classifiers. (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 language 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 gender, unlike most Indo-European languages.
  • 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.

Syntax

• Topic–comment constructions, 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, 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, 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 pronouns 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 clitics 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 pronouns 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 language. Many of the personal pronouns historically used in Literary Chinese are obsolete in Modern Chinese.

Politeness

• Linguistic systems of politeness, including frequent use of honorifics, with varying levels of politeness or respect, are well-developed in Javanese, Japanese and Korean. Politeness systems in Chinese are relatively weak, having devolved from a more developed system 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 and Korean in a controversial 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.

See also

• Classification schemes for Southeast Asian languages
• East Asia
• Southeast Asia
• EALC