The languages of East Asia belong to several distinct language families, with many common features attributed to interaction. In the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, Chinese varieties and languages of southeast Asia share many areal features, tending to be analytic languages with similar syllable and tone structure. In the 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 first two the use 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.
Language families
The Austroasiatic languages include Vietnamese and Khmer, as well as many other languages spoken in areas scattered as far afield as Malaya (Aslian) and central India (Korku), often in isolated pockets surrounded by the ranges of other language groups. Most linguists believe that Austroasiatic languages once ranged continuously across southeast Asia and that their scattered distribution today is the result of the subsequent arrival of other language groups. One of these groups were the Tai–Kadai languages such as Thai, Lao and Shan. These languages were originally spoken in southern China, where the greatest diversity within the family is still found, and possibly as far north as the Yangtze valley. As Chinese civilization expanded southward from the North China Plain, many Tai–Kadai speakers became sinicized, while others were displaced to Southeast Asia. With the exception of Zhuang, most of the Tai–Kadai languages still remaining in China are spoken in isolated upland areas. The Miao–Yao or Hmong–Mien languages also originated in southern China, where they are now spoken only in isolated hill regions. Many Hmong–Mien speakers were displaced into Southeast Asia during the Qing Dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries, triggered by the suppression of a series of revolts in Guizhou. The Austronesian languages are believed to have spread from Taiwan to the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as some areas of mainland southeast Asia. The varieties of Chinese are usually included in the Sino-Tibetan family, which also includes Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Tibet, southwest China, northeast India, Burma and neighbouring countries. To the north are the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic language families, which some linguists had grouped as an Altaic family, sometimes also including the Korean and Japonic languages, but is now seen as a discredited theory and is no longer supported by specialists in these languages. The languages tend to be atonal, polysyllabic and agglutinative, with subject–object–verb word order and some degree of vowel harmony. Critics of the Altaic hypothesis attribute the similarities to intense language contact between the languages that occurred sometime in pre-history. Chinese scholars often group Tai–Kadai and Hmong–Mien with Sino-Tibetan, but Western scholarship since the Second World War has considered them as separate families. Some larger groupings have been proposed, but are not widely supported. The Austric hypothesis, based on morphology and other resemblances, is that Austroasiatic, Austronesian, often Tai–Kadai, and sometimes Hmong–Mien form a genetic family. Other hypothetical groupings include the Sino-Austronesian languages and Austro-Tai languages. Linguists undergoing long-range comparison have hypothesized even larger macrofamilies such as Dené–Caucasian, including Sino-Tibetan and Ket.
Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area
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