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Thelanguages ofEast Asia belong to several distinctlanguage families, with many common features attributed to interaction. In theMainland Southeast Asia linguistic area,Chinese varieties andlanguages of southeast Asia share manyareal features, tending to beanalytic languages with similar syllable and tone structure. In the 1st millennium AD,Chinese culture came todominate East Asia, andClassical Chinese was adopted byscholars andruling classes inVietnam,Korea, andJapan. As a consequence, there was a massive influx ofloanwords from Chinese vocabulary into these and other neighboring Asian languages. TheChinese script was also adapted to writeVietnamese (asChữ Nôm),Korean (asHanja) andJapanese (asKanji), 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.

TheAustroasiatic languages includeVietnamese andKhmer, 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.^[1]

One of these groups were theTai–Kadai languages such asThai,Lao andShan. 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 expandedsouthward from the North China Plain, many Tai–Kadai speakers became sinicized, while others were displaced to Southeast Asia. With the exception ofZhuang, most of the Tai–Kadai languages still remaining in China are spoken in isolated upland areas.^[2]

TheMiao–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 theQing Dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries, triggered by the suppression of a series ofrevolts inGuizhou.^[3]

TheAustronesian languages are believed to have spread fromTaiwan to the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as some areas of mainland southeast Asia.^[4]

Thevarieties of Chinese are usually included in theSino-Tibetan family, which also includesTibeto-Burman languages spoken in Tibet, southwest China, northeast India, Burma and neighbouring countries.

To the north are theTurkic,Mongolic andTungusic language families, which some linguists had grouped as anAltaic family, sometimes also including theKorean andJaponic languages, but is now seen as a discredited theory and is no longer supported by specialists in these languages.^[5] The languages tend to be atonal, polysyllabic andagglutinative, withsubject–object–verb word order and some degree ofvowel harmony.^[6] Critics of the Altaic hypothesis attribute the similarities to intense language contact between the languages that occurred sometime in pre-history.^[7]

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. TheAustric hypothesis, based onmorphology and other resemblances, is that Austroasiatic, Austronesian, often Tai–Kadai, and sometimes Hmong–Mien form a genetic family. Other hypothetical groupings include theSino-Austronesian languages andAustro-Tai languages. Linguists undergoing long-range comparison have hypothesized even largermacrofamilies such asDené–Caucasian, including Sino-Tibetan andKet.

The Mainland Southeast Asialinguistic 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 byChamic) and Austroasiatic families. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion.^[8]

Characteristic of many MSEA languages is a particular syllable structure involvingmonosyllabicmorphemes,lexical tone, a fairly large inventory of consonants, including phonemicaspiration, limited clusters at the beginning of a syllable, plentiful vowel contrasts and relatively few final consonants. Languages in the northern part of the area generally have fewer vowel and final contrasts but more initial contrasts.^[9]

A well-known feature is the similar tone systems in Chinese, Hmong–Mien, Tai languages and Vietnamese. Most of these languages passed through an earlier stage with three tones on most syllables (apart fromchecked syllables ending in astop consonant), which was followed by atone 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 classification of these languages, untilHaudricourt showed in 1954 that tone was not an invariant feature, by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other languages of the Mon–Khmer family, and proposed that tone in the other languages had a similar origin.^[10]

MSEA languages tend to have monosyllabic morphemes, though there are exceptions.^[11] Most MSEA languages are veryanalytic, with noinflection and little derivational morphology. Grammatical relations are typically signalled by word order,particles andcoverbs oradpositions.Modality is expressed usingsentence-final particles. The usual word order in MSEA languages issubject–verb–object. Chinese andKaren are thought to have changed to this order from thesubject–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 before the noun.^[12][13]Topic-comment organization is also common.^[14]

Languages of both eastern and southeast Asia typically have well-developed systems ofnumeral classifiers.^[15] 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.^[16] However, similar noun class systems are also found among mostSub-Saharan African languages.

For most of the pre-modern period, Chinese culture dominated East Asia. Scholars in Vietnam, Korea and Japan wrote inLiterary Chinese and were thoroughly familiar with theChinese classics. Their languages absorbed large numbers of Chinese words, known collectively as Sino-Xenic vocabulary, i.e.Sino-Japanese,Sino-Korean andSino-Vietnamese. These words were written withChinese characters and pronounced in a local approximation ofMiddle Chinese.^[17]

Today, these words of Chinese origin may be written in thetraditional Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean),simplified Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese), a locally developed phonetic script (Koreanhangul, Japanesekana), or aLatin alphabet (Vietnamese). The Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages are collectively referred to as CJKV, or justCJK, since modern Vietnamese is no longer written with Chinese characters at all.

In a similar way to the use ofLatin andancient Greek roots in English, the morphemes of Classical Chinese have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts.^[18] These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form.^[19]

Intopic–comment constructions, sentences are frequently structured with atopic as the first segment and a comment as the second. This way of marking previously mentioned vs. newly introduced information is an alternative toarticles, 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", whereB is a comment about the topicA.

Chinese

Japanese

Korean

Ryukyuan

Okinawan Ryukyuan example:

Note that inOkinawan, 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.

Vietnamese

Vietnamese example:

Linguistic systems ofpoliteness, including frequent use ofhonorific titles, with varying levels of politeness or respect, are well-developed in Japanese and Korean.Politeness systems in Chinese are relatively weak, having simplified from amore developed system into a much less predominant role in modern Chinese.^[20] This is especially true when speaking of the southern Chinese varieties. However, Vietnamese has retained a highly complex system of pronouns, in which the terms mostly derive from Chinese. For example,bác,chú,dượng, andcậu are all terms ultimately derived from Chinese and all refer to different statuses of "uncle".

In many of the region's languages, including Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Malay/Indonesian, newpersonal pronouns or forms of reference or address can and often do evolve from nouns as fresh ways of expressing respect or social status. Thus personal pronouns areopen class words rather thanclosed class words: they are not stable over time, not few in number, and notclitics whose use is obligatory in grammatical constructs. In addition toKorean honorifics that indicate politeness toward the subject of the speech,Korean speech levels indicate a level of politeness and familiarity directed toward the audience.

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.^{[citation needed]}

• EALC

• Hanzangyu yuyin he cihui 汉藏语语音和词汇 (2017), comparative lexicon of languages in southern China

• Languages of East Asia
• Linguistic typology

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