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Asia is home to hundreds of languages comprising several families and some unrelated isolates. The most spoken language families on the continent include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Japonic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan, Kra–Dai and Koreanic. Many languages of Asia, such as Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Tamil or ...
For most of the pre-modern period, Chinese culture dominated East Asia. Scholars in Vietnam, Korea and Japan wrote in Literary Chinese and were thoroughly familiar with the Chinese classics. Their languages absorbed large numbers of Chinese words, known collectively as Sino-Xenic vocabulary, i.e. Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese.
South Asia is home to several hundred languages, spanning the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It is home to the fourth most spoken language in the world, Hindi–Urdu; and the sixth most spoken language, Bengali. Languages like Bengali, Tamil and Nepali have official/national status ...
The Austroasiatic languages are further characterized as having unusually large vowel inventories and employing some sort of register contrast, either between modal (normal) voice and breathy (lax) voice or between modal voice and creaky voice. [10] Languages in the Pearic branch and some in the Vietic branch can have a three- or even four-way ...
Stanley Starosta's (2005) [16] East Asian proposal includes a "Yangzian" branch, consisting of Austroasiatic and Hmong–Mien, to form an East Asian superphylum. However, Starosta believes his proposed Yangzian to be a direct sister of Sino-Tibetan rather than Austronesian, which is more distantly related to Sino-Tibetan as a sister of Sino ...
The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. [1] Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological ...
The spoken languages of nationalities that are a part of China belong to at least nine families: Ethnolinguistic map of China. The Sino-Tibetan family: 19 official ethnicities (including the Han and Tibetans) The Tai–Kadai family: several languages spoken by the Zhuang, the Bouyei, the Dai, the Dong, and the Hlai (Li people); 9 official ...
The Dené–Caucasian proposal. Several macrofamily schemes have been proposed for linking multiple language families of Southeast Asia. None of these proposals is yet accepted by mainstream comparative linguistics, though research into higher-level relationships among these languages has gained some renewed scholarly interest over the last three decades; the various hypotheses are still under ...