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East Asian languages describe two notional groupings of languages in East
East Asia

East Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either Geography or cultural terms. Geography and geopolitically, it covers about 12,000,000 km?, or about 28 percent of the Asian continent, about 15 percent bigger than the area of Europe, though some categorize Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia as Central Asia....
 and Southeast
Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India and north of Australia....
 Asia
Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent. It covers 8.6% of the Earth's total surface area and, with over 4 billion people, it contains more than 60% of the world's current human population....
: Although most of these languages are genetically unrelated, they share many areal features due to geographic proximity. This is also known as the East Asian sprachbund
Sprachbund

A Sprachbund , from the German language word for ?language union?, 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....
.

CJKV area refers to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, the languages with large amounts of vocabulary of Chinese origin (i.e.






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East Asian languages describe two notional groupings of languages in East
East Asia

East Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either Geography or cultural terms. Geography and geopolitically, it covers about 12,000,000 km?, or about 28 percent of the Asian continent, about 15 percent bigger than the area of Europe, though some categorize Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia as Central Asia....
 and Southeast
Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India and north of Australia....
 Asia
Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent. It covers 8.6% of the Earth's total surface area and, with over 4 billion people, it contains more than 60% of the world's current human population....
:
  • Languages which have been greatly influenced by Classical Chinese
    Classical Chinese

    Classical 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 Chinese spoken language....
     and the Chinese writing system, in particular Chinese
    Chinese language

    Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of language mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan languages of languages....
    , Japanese
    Japanese language

    IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
    , Korean
    Korean language

    Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China....
     and Vietnamese
    Vietnamese language

    Vietnamese , formerly known under French colonization as Annamese , is the national language and official language language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people , who constitute 86% of Demographics of Vietnam, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese, most of whom live in the United States....
     (also known as CJK
    CJK

    CJK is a collective term for Chinese language, Japanese language, and Korean language, which constitute the main East Asian languages. The term is used in the field of software and communications internationalization....
    V).
  • The larger grouping of languages including the CJKV area as well as several language groups of Southeast Asia including other Sino-Tibetan
    Sino-Tibetan languages

    The Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family composed of, at least, the Chinese language and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia....
    , Kradai, and Austronesian languages
    Austronesian languages

    The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia....
    .
Although most of these languages are genetically unrelated, they share many areal features due to geographic proximity. This is also known as the East Asian sprachbund
Sprachbund

A Sprachbund , from the German language word for ?language union?, 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....
.

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

China is a Culture of China, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
 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)

Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules....
 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, occasionally in Japanese, Korean), simplified Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese), a locally developed phonetic script (Korean hangul
Hangul

Hangul is the native alphabet of the Korean language, as distinguished from the logogram Sino-Korean vocabulary hanja system. It was created in the mid-fifteenth century, and is now the official writing system of both North Korea and South Korea, being co-official in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of China....
, occasionally in Japanese kana
Kana

Kana are the Syllabary Japanese language scripts, as opposed to the Logogram Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as romaji....
), or a modified Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
 (Vietnamese alphabet
Vietnamese alphabet

The Vietnamese alphabet has the following 29 letters, in collation order:Vietnamese also uses the ten Digraph s and one Trigraph below.These groups were formerly considered single letters and are treated as such in older dictionaries....
).

Areal linguistic features

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

Phonology

  • Monosyllabic morphemes
    • are typical of Chinese and Vietnamese, but also Burmese, Thai, Lao, and some other languages of mainland Southeast Asia
      Southeast Asia

      Southeast Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India and north of Australia....
       and South China
      South China

      South China or Southern China can refer to* South China Athletic Association - a sports club in Hong Kong First Division League* South China ...
      . They are not usual in Korean, Japanese, or Austronesian languages, though.
    • Monosyllabic morphemes do not always imply monosyllabic words; Chinese is rich in polysyllabic words. Some polysyllabic morphemes exist even in Chinese and Vietnamese, often loan words from other languages.
  • Tonality
    Tone (linguistics)

    Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning?that is, to distinguish or inflection words. All languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation , but not all languages use tones to distingu...
    • Chinese and Vietnamese, as well as Burmese, Thai, Lao, and some other languages of mainland Southeast Asia and South China are tonal languages. Korean, Japanese, and Austronesian languages do not have morphemic tone. (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

      Old Chinese , or Archaic Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken from the Shang Dynasty , well into the Former Han Dynasty ....
       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 South Asia, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan....
       have suggested that these languages originally did not have morphemic tone, but later developed it; the process of tone development is known as tonogenesis.

Morphology

  • Analytic structure
    • Chinese and languages of Southeast Asia are highly analytic languages. Words are not obligatorily marked or inflected
      Inflection

      In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as grammatical tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical case....
       for gender
      Grammatical gender

      In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once....
      , number
      Grammatical number

      In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
      , person
      Grammatical person

      Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deixis 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....
      , case
      Grammatical case

      In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject , of direct object, or of possession ....
      , tense
      Grammatical tense

      Grammatical tense is a temporal language quality expressing the time at, during, or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs.Tense is one of at least five qualities, along with grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, and grammatical person, which verb forms may express....
      , or mood
      Grammatical mood

      Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive verb forms that are used to signal Linguistic modality.It is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although these concepts are conflated to some degree in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages, insofar as the same word patterns are used...
      . Instead, these properties can optionally be indicated by adding independent, invariant modifier words and particles
      Grammatical particle

      A particle, in grammar, is a function word that is not assignable to any of the traditional grammatical word classes . The term is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of elements and lacks a precise universal definition....
       that are sometimes not even bound morpheme
      Bound morpheme

      In morphology , a bound morpheme is a morpheme that cannot stand alone as an independent word while carrying the lexical meaning related to the one in the word it is taken from....
      s.
    • Japanese verbs
      Japanese verb conjugations

      This page is a list of Japanese language verb and adjective conjugations. Since these are almost all regular, they can all be included on one page. Japanese verb conjugation is the same for all subjects, first grammatical person , second grammatical person and third grammatical person , singular and plural....
       and Korean verbs
      Korean language

      Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China....
       do have suffixes for properties of the verb itself like aspect, mood, and tense, similar to those of the Ural-Altaic languages further north, but agree with Chinese and Southeast Asian languages in not marking gender, number, or any other properties of the verb argument
      Verb argument

      In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntax relationship with the verb in a clause. In English language, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object ....
      s 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 word
      Measure word

      In linguistics, measure words, known more formally as numeral classifiers and also called counters, count words, counter words, or counting words, are words that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate the count of nouns....
      s or numerical classifier
      Classifier (linguistics)

      A classifier, in linguistics, is a word or morpheme used in some languages to classify a noun according to its meaning.Classifier systems should not be confused with noun classes, which often categorize nouns in ways independent from meaning, such as according to morphology ....
      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 language
      Bengali language

      Bengali or Bangla is an Indo-European languages language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages....
       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
      Grammatical gender

      In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once....
      , unlike most Indo-European languages
      Indo-European languages

      The Indo-European languages are a Language family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau , Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent ....
      .
    • 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
      Pacific Rim

      The Pacific Rim refers to the countries and cities located around the edge of the Pacific Ocean. There are many economic centers around the Pacific Rim, such as Auckland, Busan, Brisbane, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Lima, Los Angeles, California, Manila, Melbourne, Panama City, Portland, Oregon, San Diego, California, San Francisco, Cali...
       areal feature. However, similar noun class systems are also found among most Sub-Saharan African languages
      African languages

      There are an estimated 2,000 languages spoken in Africa. They fall into four major language family:*Afro-Asiatic languages stretches from North Africa to the Horn of Africa and Southwest Asia....
      .


Syntax

  • Topic-comment constructions
    Topic-prominent language

    A topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its syntax so that Sentence s have a topic-comment structure, in which the topic is the thing being talked about and the comment is what is said about the topic....
    , in which sentences are frequently structured with a topic
    Topic (linguistics)

    In linguistics, the topic is the part of the proposition of a Predicate Sentence . Once stated, the topic is therefore "old news", i.e. it has already been mentioned and understood....
     as the first segment and a comment as the second.


Mandarin Chinese example:

?? ? ?? ? ?? ?? ??
?? ? ?? ? ?? ?? ??
Transcription: Jintian de wanfan wo yijing chiguo 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.)


Japanese example:

?? ? ??? ? ?? ????
Transcription: Kyo no bangohan wa mo tabeta.
Gloss: today GENITIVE dinner TOPIC already eat-PERFECTIVE
Translation: I've already eaten today's dinner. (Topic: today's dinner; Comment: already eaten.)


Korean example:

?? ? ??? ? ?? ???.
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 types of reference being made by the noun, and to specify the volume or numerical scope of that reference....
, which are not found in East Asian languages.

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 clitic
    Clitic

    In linguistics, a clitic is a grammatically independent and phonology dependent word. 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 pronouns
      Chinese pronouns

      There are seven basic pronouns in Mandarin Chinese:Originally, Chinese had no distinction for gender in the second- and third-person pronouns, and no distinction for animacy in the third-person either....
       are partly an exception; the 1st/2nd/3rd person pronouns wo,ni, and ta 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
      Chinese honorifics

      Class consciousness and Confucian principles of order and respect helped promote the development of an elaborate system of honorific language in Ancient and Imperial China....
      . Many of the personal pronouns historically used in Literary Chinese are obsolete in Modern Chinese
      Modern Chinese

      Modern Chinese can refer to the following:*History of China#Modern_era*Any or all of the modern Spoken Chinese.:Or more commonly, the modern spoken standard: Standard Mandarin...
      .


Politeness

  • Linguistic systems of politeness
    Politeness

    Politeness is best expressed as the practical application of good manners or etiquette. It is a culturally defined phenomenon, and what is considered polite in one culture can often be quite rude or simply strange in another....
    , including frequent use of honorific
    Honorific

    An honorific is a word or expression that conveys esteem or respect when used in addressing or referring to a person. "Honorific" may refer broadly to the style of language or particular words or grammatical markings used in this way, including words used to express honor to one perceived as a social superior....
    s, with varying levels of politeness or respect, are well-developed in Javanese
    Javanese language

    Javanese is the language of the people in 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 system
    Chinese honorifics

    Class consciousness and Confucian principles of order and respect helped promote the development of an elaborate system of honorific language in Ancient and Imperial China....
     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, du?ng, and c?u 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 such as Australian languages, Indo-Pacific languages
Indo-Pacific languages

Indo-Pacific is a language family proposed in 1971 by Joseph Greenberg. It groups all of the languages of New Guinea into a single language family, except for those belonging to the Austronesian languages family....
, Paleosiberian languages
Paleosiberian languages

Paleosiberian languages or Paleoasian languages is a term of convenience used in linguistics to classify a disparate groupof languages spoken in remote regions of Siberia....
, and Indo-European languages
Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a Language family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau , Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent ....
, as well as Afro-Asiatic languages
Afro-Asiatic languages

The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 living languages and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Southwest Asia ....
. Some features loosely similar to some seen in many of the even more distant African languages
African languages

There are an estimated 2,000 languages spoken in Africa. They fall into four major language family:*Afro-Asiatic languages stretches from North Africa to the Horn of Africa and Southwest Asia....
, such as short, tonal morphemes and a large number of noun classes are likely to have originated independently.

Languages of East and Southeast Asia are classified into multiple language families:

  • Austro-Asiatic
    Austro-Asiatic languages

    The Austro-Asiatic languages are a large language family of Southeast Asia, and also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh. The name comes from the Latin word for "south" and the Greek language name of Asia, hence "South Asia." Among these languages, only Vietnamese language, Khmer language, and Mon language have a long established record...
  • Austronesian
    Austronesian languages

    The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia....
    • Formosan
      Formosan languages

      The Formosan languages are the languages of the Taiwanese aborigines of Taiwan. Taiwanese aborigines currently comprise about 2% of the island's population....
    • Malayo-Polynesian
      Malayo-Polynesian languages

      The Malayo-Polynesian languages are a subgroup of the Austronesian languages, with approximately 351 million speakers. These are widely dispersed throughout the island nations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, with a smaller number in continental Asia....


  • Hmong-Mien
    Hmong-Mien languages

    The Hmong-Mien or Miao-Yao languages are a small language family of southern China and Southeast Asia. They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including Guizhou, Hunan, Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, and Hubei provinces, where its speakers have been relegated to being "hill people," while the Han Chinese have settled the more...
  • Kradai
  • Sino-Tibetan
    Sino-Tibetan languages

    The Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family composed of, at least, the Chinese language and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia....
    • Chinese
      Chinese language

      Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of language mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan languages of languages....
    • Tibeto-Burman
      Tibeto-Burman languages

      The Tibeto-Burman family of languages is spoken in various Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and southeast Asian countries, including Burma , Tibet, northern Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, parts of central China , northern parts of Nepal, eastern parts of Bangladesh , Bhutan, northern parts of Pakistan , and various regions of India ....
  • Japonic
    Japonic languages

    Japonic or Japanese-Ryukyuan is a language family composed of Japanese language and Ryukyuan languages. Their common ancestral language is known as Proto-Japonic or Proto-Japanese-Ryukyuan. The essential feature of this classification is that the first split in the family resulted in the separation of all dialects of Japane...
  • Korean
    Korean language

    Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China....


See also

  • East Asia
    East Asia

    East Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either Geography or cultural terms. Geography and geopolitically, it covers about 12,000,000 km?, or about 28 percent of the Asian continent, about 15 percent bigger than the area of Europe, though some categorize Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia as Central Asia....
  • Southeast Asia
    Southeast Asia

    Southeast Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China, east of India and north of Australia....