East Asian Languages - Language Families

Language Families

The languages of Southeast Asia and East Asia belong to several language families.

The Austro-Asiatic languages include Vietnamese and Khmer, as well as many other languages spoken in areas scattered as far afield as Malaya and eastern India, often in isolated pockets surrounded by the ranges of other language groups. Most linguists believe that Austro-Asiatic 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 deversity 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 Sinified, but some migrated 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 migrated to southeast Asia 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 Chinese languages 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 group as an Altaic family, often also including Japonic and Korean. The languages tend to be atonal, polysyllabic and agglutinative, with subject–object–verb word order and some degree of vowel harmony, and much vocabulary is shared between subgroups. Critics of the Altaic hypothesis attribute the similarities to language contact.

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 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.