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East Asian languages or the East Asian sprachbund describe two notional groupings of languages in East and Southeast Asia, either (1) languages which have been greatly influenced by Classical Chinese, or the CJKV Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) area or (2) a larger grouping including the CJKV area as well as several language groups of Southeast Asia including other Sino-Tibetan languages, Tai-Kadai, and Austronesian languages. Geographic scope of East Asia East Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms. ...
Location of Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is a subregion of Asia. ...
World map showing Asia (geographically) Asia is the central and eastern part of Eurasia and worlds largest continent. ...
Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of Zhou Dynasty Chinese, making it very different from any modern spoken form of Chinese. ...
Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, in number of speakers worldwide second only to Indo-European. ...
The Tai-Kadai languages, also known simply as Kadai, are a language family found in Southeast Asia and southern China. ...
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ...
CJKV area
The CJKV area refers to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, the languages with large amounts of vocabulary of Chinese origin, and which are or were formerly written with Chinese characters Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...
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-forming 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 into Chinese where they are used without Chinese speakers being aware of Japanese origin. The examples currently surviving as national languages are: Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese (文言, pinyin: wényán, literal meaning: literary language or 古文, literal: ancient written language) is a traditional style of written Chinese prose using grammar and vocabulary very different from any modern spoken form of Chinese. ...
Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ...
Today, words of Chinese origin may be written in the original Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese, occasionally in Korean), simplified Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese), a locally developed phonetic script (Korean, occasionally in Japanese), or a modified Roman alphabet (Vietnamese). See CJK for discussion of software support for the unique properties of East Asian languages. CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which comprise the main East Asian languages. ...
Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ...
Areal linguistic features Some other areal features partially coincide with or extend beyond the CJKV area: An areal feature, in linguistics, is the appearance of a given feature of typology in several unrelated languages due to the influence of geographical closeness. ...
Morphology - Monosyllabic morphemes are typical of Chinese and Vietnamese, but also Burmese, Thai, Lao, and some other languages of mainland Southeast Asia and 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: 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 and ancient Tibetan have suggested that these languages originally did not have morphemic tone, but later developed it. (tonogenesis)
- 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 that are sometimes not even bound morphemes.
- Japanese and Korean do have verb inflections 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 arguments on the verb itself.
- 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 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.
In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ...
Location of Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is a subregion of Asia. ...
North China (北方 Hanyu pinyin: Běifāng) and South China (南方 Hanyu pinyin: Nánfāng) are two approximate regions within China. ...
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ...
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Location of Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is a subregion of Asia. ...
North China (北方 Hanyu pinyin: Běifāng) and South China (南方 Hanyu pinyin: Nánfāng) are two approximate regions within China. ...
Old Chinese (formerly called Archaic Chinese) (Simplified Chinese: 上å¤æ±‰è¯; Traditional Chinese: 上å¤æ¼¢èªž; pinyin: ), refers to the Chinese spoken during the Zhou Dynasty (10th century BC – 256 BC). ...
The Tibetan language is typically classified as member of the Tibeto-Burman which in turn is thought by some to be a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. ...
Tonogenesis is the appearance of contrasting tone in a previously non-tonal language, generally as a result of regular phonological changes. ...
An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and considered to be full-fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ...
An analytic language (or isolating language) is a language in which the vast majority of morphemes are free morphemes and considered to be full-fledged words. By contrast, in a synthetic language, a word is composed of agglutinated or fused morphemes that denote its syntactic meanings. ...
Inflection or inflexion refers to a modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) so that it reflects grammatical (i. ...
In linguistics, grammatical genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns requiring different agreement forms on determiners, adjectives, verbs or other words. ...
Number, in linguistics, is a grammatical category used to express the quantity of objects referred to by a noun. ...
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to the participant role of a referent, such as the speaker, the addressee, and others. ...
In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages: generally, the alteration of a noun to indicate its grammatical role. ...
Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ...
In linguistics, many grammars have the concept of grammatical mood, which describes the relationship of a verb with reality and intent. ...
Bound morphemes can only occur when attached to root morphemes. ...
The Ural-Altaic language family is a grouping of languages which was once widely accepted by linguists, but has since become contoversial. ...
A syntactic verb argument, in linguistics, is a phrase that appears in a relationship with the verb in a proposition. ...
Measure words, in linguistics, are words (or morphemes) that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate the count of nouns. ...
A classifier, in linguistics, is a word or morpheme used in some languages in certain contexts to indicate the word class of a noun. ...
Map of the Pacific Rim and List of the Pacific Rim Nations The USS Abraham Lincoln Battle Group along with ships from Australia, Chile, Japan, Canada, and Korea speed towards Honolulu in RIMPAC 2000. ...
Semantics - Linguistic systems of politeness, including frequent use of honorifics, with varying levels of politeness or respect, are well-developed in Javanese, Japanese and Korean.
- With modernization, 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.
- Pronouns in Japanese, Malay/Indonesian and some other languages are not stable over time and few in number. New 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 pronouns in the Western sense at all.
- Chinese is an exception, having stable 1st/2nd/3rd person pronouns that 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 language.
Politeness is best expressed as the practical application of good manners or etiquette. ...
An honorific is a term used to convey esteem or respect. ...
The Javanese language is the inferred language of the people in the central and eastern part of the island of Java, in Indonesia. ...
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that usually takes the place of a noun or noun phrase that was previously mentioned (such as she, it) or that refers to something or someone (I, me, you). Pronouns are often one of the basic parts of speech of the...
Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, in number of speakers worldwide second only to Indo-European. ...
Syntax - Topic-comment constructions, in which sentences are frequently structured with a "topic" (subject) as the first segment and a "comment" (predicate) as the second.
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- Japanese example:
- こちらは 田中さんです。 Kochira wa Tanaka san desu.
- (GLOSS) This direction/person <TOPIC MARKER> Tanaka-san is.
- (TRANSLATION) "This is Tanaka-san (Mr/Ms/Miss Tanaka)."
- Chinese:
- 你的衣服,为什么这么脏? Ni de yifu, wei shenme zheme zang?
- (GLOSS)You-POSSESSIVE clothes, why so dirty?
- (TRANSLATION) Why are your clothes so dirty?
A topic-prominent language is one that organizes its syntax so that sentences have a topic-comment (or theme-rheme) structure, where the topic is the thing being talked about (predicated) and the comment is what is said about the topic. ...
Linguistic relationships These features strongly contrast with major language groups bordering East and Southeast Asia such as Australian languages, Indo-Pacific languages, Paleosiberian languages, and Indo-European languages, as well as Afro-Asiatic languages. Some features loosely similar to some seen in many of the even more distant African languages, such as short, tonal morphemes and a large number of noun classes are likely to have originated independently. The Australian Aboriginal languages are a Australia, and the rest are descended linguistically from them. ...
The Indo-Pacific super-family groups together several language families, mainly spoken in Papua New Guinea and nearby regions, which are not Austronesian, together with the native languages of Tasmania and the Andaman Islands. ...
Paleosiberian (Palaeosiberian, Paleo-Siberian) languages or Paleoasian languages (from Greek palaios, ancient) is a term of convenience used in linguistics to classify a disparate group of languages spoken in remote regions of Siberia. ...
The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects, including most of the major language families of Europe, as well as many languages of Southwest and South Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ...
Map showing the distribution of Afro-Asiatic languages The Afro-Asiatic languages are a language family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia. ...
The term African languages refers to the approximately 1800 languages spoken in Africa. ...
Languages of East and Southeast Asia are classified into multiple language families, signifying that there is not currently evidence demonstrating that they all directly descended from a common ancestor. Therefore many of the common areal features are likely due to borrowing between neighboring languages over thousands of years, via the typical sprachbund mechanisms. The highest-level hypothesized families include: Most languages are known to belong to language families (families hereforth). ...
Borrowing can refer to: The use of loanwords. ...
A Sprachbund (German for language union) (also known as linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area) is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity. ...
Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, second only to Indo-European in terms of the number of speakers. ...
The Hmong-Mien languages are a language family of southern China and Southeast Asia. ...
The Tai-Kadai languages are a language family found in Southeast Asia and southern China. ...
The Austric language superfamily is a large grouping of languages primarily spoken in South East Asia and the Pacific. ...
The Fuyu languages or Buyeo/PuyÇ’ languages are a hypothetical language family that would relate the languages of Fuyu, Goguryeo, Baekje and the Japonic languages, and possibly place them together as a nuclear family under the hypothetical Altaic language supra-family. ...
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