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The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a
sprachbund A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The lan ...
including languages of the
Sino-Tibetan Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and
Austroasiatic The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are th ...
families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion.
James Matisoff James Alan Matisoff ( zh, , t=馬蒂索夫, s=马蒂索夫, p=Mǎdìsuǒfū or zh, , t=馬提索夫, s=马提索夫, p=Mǎtísuǒfū; born July 14, 1937) is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a ...
referred to this area as the "Sinosphere", contrasted with the "
Indosphere Indosphere is a term coined by the linguist James Matisoff for areas of Indian linguistic and cultural influence in South Asia and Southeast Asia. It is commonly used in areal linguistics in contrast with Sinosphere. Influence The Tibeto-B ...
", but viewed it as a zone of mutual influence in the ancient period.


Language distribution

The Austroasiatic languages include
Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia ** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam. * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overse ...
and Khmer, as well as many other languages spoken in scattered pockets as far afield as Malaya and eastern India. Most linguists believe that Austroasiatic languages once ranged continuously across southeast Asia and that their scattered distribution today is the result of the subsequent migration of speakers of other language groups from southern China. Chinese civilization and the
Chinese language Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the ...
spread from their home in the
North China Plain The North China Plain or Huang-Huai-Hai Plain () is a large-scale downfaulted rift basin formed in the late Paleogene and Neogene and then modified by the deposits of the Yellow River. It is the largest alluvial plain of China. The plain is border ...
into the Yangtze valley and then into southern China during the first millennium BC and first millennium AD. Indigenous groups in these areas either became Chinese, retreated to the hill country, or migrated to the south. Thus the Kra–Dai languages, today including Thai, Lao and Shan, were originally spoken in what is now southern China, where the greatest diversity within the family is still found, and possibly as far north as the Yangtze valley. With the exception of Zhuang, most of the Kra–Dai languages still remaining in China are spoken in isolated upland areas. Similarly the Hmong–Mien languages may originally have been spoken in the middle
Yangtze The Yangtze or Yangzi ( or ; ) is the longest river in Asia, the third-longest in the world, and the longest in the world to flow entirely within one country. It rises at Jari Hill in the Tanggula Mountains (Tibetan Plateau) and flows ...
. Today they are scattered across isolated hill regions of southern China. Many of them migrated to southeast Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries, after the suppression of a series of revolts in
Guizhou Guizhou (; Postal romanization, formerly Kweichow) is a landlocked Provinces of China, province in the Southwest China, southwest region of the China, People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Guiyang, in the center of the pr ...
. The upland regions of the interior of the area, as well as the plains of Burma, are home to speakers of other Sino-Tibetan languages, the
Tibeto-Burman languages The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people sp ...
. The Austronesian languages, spoken across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, are represented in MSEA by the divergent Chamic group. The far southern Sinitic languages
Cantonese Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding a ...
and
Pinghua Pinghua (; Yale: ''Pìhng Wá''; sometimes disambiguated as /) is a pair of Sinitic languages spoken mainly in parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with some speakers in Hunan province. Pinghua is a trade language in some areas of Gu ...
are also part of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, as demonstrated by Hilário de Sousa (2015). Mark Post (2015) observes that the
Tani languages Tani (alternatively Miric, ''Adi–Galo–Mising–Nishi-Tagin'' (Bradley 1997), or ''Abor–Miri–Dafla'' (Matisoff 2003)), is a branch of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken mostly in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, and neighboring regions. Background Th ...
of
Arunachal Pradesh Arunachal Pradesh (, ) is a state in Northeastern India. It was formed from the erstwhile North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) region, and became a state on 20 February 1987. It borders the states of Assam and Nagaland to the south. It shares ...
,
Northeast India , native_name_lang = mni , settlement_type = , image_skyline = , image_alt = , image_caption = , motto = , image_map = Northeast india.png , ...
typologically fit into the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, which typically has creoloid morphosyntactic patterns, rather than with the languages of the Tibetosphere. Post (2015) also notes that Tani culture is similar to those of Mainland Southeast Asian
hill tribe Hill people, also referred to as mountain people, is a general term for people who live in the hills and mountains. This includes all rugged land above and all land (including plateaus) above elevation. The climate is generally harsh, with ...
cultures, and is not particularly adapted to cold montane environments. David Gil (2015)Gil, David. 2015. ‘The Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area?’ In N. J. Enfield and B. Comrie, Eds. ''Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art''. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter. considers the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area to be part of the larger
Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area The Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area is a linguistic area proposed by David Gil (2015).Gil, David. 2015. �The Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area?�� In N. J. Enfield and B. Comrie, Eds. ''Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art''. Be ...
, which also includes languages in
Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Gui ...
west of the
Mamberamo River The Mamberamo (''Indonesian: Sungai Mamberamo'') is the second longest river on the island of New Guinea, after Sepik River (1,146 km) and third largest in Oceania by discharge (5,500 m3/s) volume after Fly River (7,500 m3/s) and Sepik (7,00 ...
.


Syllable structure

A characteristic of MSEA languages is a particular syllable structure involving
monosyllabic In linguistics, a monosyllable is a word or utterance of only one syllable. It is most commonly studied in the fields of phonology and morphology and it has no semantic content. The word has originated from the Greek language. "Yes", "no", "jump", ...
morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...
s, lexical tone, a fairly large inventory of consonants, including phonemic aspiration, limited clusters at the beginning of a syllable, and plentiful vowel contrasts. Final consonants are typically highly restricted, often limited to glides and nasals or
unreleased stop A stop with no audible release, also known as an unreleased stop or an applosive, is a stop consonant with no release burst: no audible indication of the end of its occlusion (hold). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, lack of an audible rele ...
s at the same points of articulation, with no clusters and no voice distinction. Languages in the northern part of the area generally have fewer vowel and final contrasts but more initial contrasts. Most MSEA languages tend to have monosyllabic morphemes, but there are exceptions. Some polysyllabic morphemes exist even in Old Chinese and Vietnamese, often loanwords from other languages. A related syllable structure found in some languages, such as the
Mon–Khmer languages The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are t ...
, is the
sesquisyllable Primarily in Austroasiatic languages (also known as Mon–Khmer), in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor) syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or , with a reduced vowel, as ...
(from meaning "one and a half"), consisting of a stressed syllable with approximately the above structure, preceded by an unstressed "minor" syllable consisting only of a consonant and a
neutral vowel In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it r ...
. That structure is present in many conservative Mon–Khmer languages such as Khmer (Cambodian), as well as in Burmese, and it is reconstructed for the older stages of a number of
Sino-Tibetan languages Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages ...
.


Tone systems

Phonemic tone Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
is one of the most well-known of southeast Asian language characteristics. Many of the languages in the area have strikingly similar tone systems, which appear to have developed in the same way.


Origin of tonal contrasts

The tone systems of
Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the '' Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The ...
, proto-Hmong–Mien,
proto-Tai Proto-Tai is the reconstructed proto-language (common ancestor) of all the Tai languages, including modern Lao, Shan, Tai Lü, Tai Dam, Ahom, Northern Thai, Standard Thai, Bouyei, and Zhuang. The Proto-Tai language is not directly atteste ...
and early Vietnamese all display a three-way tonal contrast in syllables lacking stop endings. In traditional analyses, syllables ending in stops have been treated as a fourth or "
checked tone A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the phonetic sense but rather a sy ...
", because their distribution parallels that of syllables with nasal codas. Moreover, the earliest strata of loans display a regular correspondence between tonal categories in the different languages: The incidence of these tones in Chinese, Tai and Hmong–Mien words follows a similar ratio 2:1:1. Thus
rhyme dictionaries A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book () is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary that collates characters by tone and rhyme, instead of by radical. The most important rime dictionary tradition began with the ''Qieyun'' (601), whi ...
such as the ''
Qieyun The ''Qieyun'' () is a Chinese rhyme dictionary, published in 601 during the Sui dynasty. The book was a guide to proper reading of classical texts, using the ''fanqie'' method to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters. The ''Qieyun'' ...
'' divide the level tone between two volumes while covering each of the other tones in a single volume. Vietnamese has a different distribution, with tone B four times more common than tone C. It was long believed that tone was an invariant feature of languages, suggesting that these groups must be related. However this category cut across groups of languages with shared basic vocabulary. In 1954
André-Georges Haudricourt André-Georges Haudricourt (; 17 January 1911 – 20 August 1996) was a French botanist, anthropologist and linguist. Biography He grew up on his parents' farm, in a remote area of Picardy. From his early childhood, he was curious about technol ...
solved this paradox by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other (atonal) Austroasiatic languages. He thus argued that the Austroasiatic proto-language had been atonal, and that its development in Vietnamese had been conditioned by these consonants, which had subsequently disappeared, a process now known as tonogenesis. Haudricourt further proposed that tone in the other languages had a similar origin. Other scholars have since uncovered transcriptional and other evidence for these consonants in early forms of Chinese, and many linguists now believe that
Old Chinese Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 12 ...
was atonal. A smaller amount of similar evidence has been found for proto-Tai. Moreover, since the realization of tone categories as pitch contours varies so widely between languages, the correspondence observed in early loans suggests that the conditioning consonants were still present at the time of borrowing.


Loss of voicing with tone or register split

A characteristic
sound change A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chan ...
(a
phonemic split In historical linguistics, phonological change is any sound change that alters the distribution of phonemes in a language. In other words, a language develops a new system of oppositions among its phonemes. Old contrasts may disappear, new ones ...
) occurred in most southeast Asian languages around 1000 AD. First, syllables with voiced initial consonants came to be pronounced with a lower pitch than those with unvoiced initials. In most of these languages, with a few exceptions such as
Wu Chinese The Wu languages (; Wu romanization and IPA: ''wu6 gniu6'' [] ( Shanghainese), ''ng2 gniu6'' [] (Suzhounese), Mandarin pinyin and IPA: ''Wúyǔ'' []) is a major group of Sinitic languages spoken primarily in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Zhejiang Provin ...
, the voicing distinction subsequently disappeared, and the pitch contour became distinctive. In tonal languages, each of the tones split into two "registers", yielding a typical pattern of six tones in unchecked syllables and two in checked ones.
Pinghua Pinghua (; Yale: ''Pìhng Wá''; sometimes disambiguated as /) is a pair of Sinitic languages spoken mainly in parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with some speakers in Hunan province. Pinghua is a trade language in some areas of Gu ...
and
Yue Chinese Yue () is a group of similar Sinitic languages spoken in Southern China, particularly in Liangguang (the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces). The name Cantonese is often used for the whole group, but linguists prefer to reserve that name for ...
, as well as neighbouring Tai languages, have further tone splits in checked syllables, while many other Chinese varieties, including
Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
, have merged some tonal categories. Many non-tonal languages instead developed a register split, with voiced consonants producing breathy-voiced vowels and unvoiced consonants producing normally voiced vowels. Often, the breathy-voiced vowels subsequently went through additional, complex changes (e.g. diphthongization). Examples of languages affected this way are
Mon Mon, MON or Mon. may refer to: Places * Mon State, a subdivision of Myanmar * Mon, India, a town in Nagaland * Mon district, Nagaland * Mon, Raebareli, a village in Uttar Pradesh, India * Mon, Switzerland, a village in the Canton of Grisons * A ...
and Khmer (Cambodian). Breathy voicing has since been lost in standard Khmer, although the vowel changes triggered by it still remain. Many of these languages have subsequently developed some voiced obstruents. The most common such sounds are and (often pronounced with some implosion), which result from former preglottalized and , which were common phonemes in many Asian languages and which behaved like voiceless obstruents. In addition, Vietnamese developed voiced fricatives through a different process (specifically, in words consisting of two syllables, with an initial, unstressed
minor syllable Primarily in Austroasiatic languages (also known as Mon–Khmer), in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor) syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or , with a reduced vowel, as i ...
, the medial stop at the beginning of the stressed major syllable turned into a voiced fricative, and then the minor syllable was lost).


Morphology and syntax

Most MSEA languages are of the isolating type, with mostly mono-morphemic words, no
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
and little
affixation In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ...
. Nouns are derived by compounding; for example,
Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
is rich in polysyllabic words. Grammatical relations are typically signalled by word order,
particle In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from ...
s and
coverb A coverb is a word or prefix that resembles a verb or co-operates with a verb. In languages that have the serial verb construction, coverbs are a type of word that shares features of verbs and prepositions. A coverb takes an object or compleme ...
s or
preposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
s.
Modality Modality may refer to: Humanities * Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations * Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales * Modaliti ...
is expressed using
sentence-final particle Sentence-final particles, including modal particles, interactional particles, etc., are minimal lexemes (words) that occur at the end of a sentence and that do not carry referential meaning, but may relate to linguistic modality, register or other p ...
s. The usual word order in MSEA languages is subject–verb–object. Chinese, Bai and
Karen Karen may refer to: * Karen (name), a given name and surname * Karen (slang), a term and meme for a demanding woman displaying certain behaviors People * Karen people, an ethnic group in Myanmar and Thailand ** Karen languages or Karenic la ...
are thought to have changed to this order from the subject–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 and Hmongic languages, while in Chinese varieties and
Mienic languages The Mienic or Yao languages are spoken by the Yao people of China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Some of the Yao peoples speak Hmongic languages (Miao); these are called '' Bunu''. A small population of Yao people in Jinxiu Yao Autonomous Cou ...
most modifiers are placed before the noun.
Topic-comment In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally ...
organization is also common. MSEA languages typically have well-developed systems of
numeral classifier A classifier (abbreviated or ) is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to "classify" a noun depending on the type of its referent. It is also sometimes called a measure word or counter word. Classifiers play an importan ...
s. The
Bengali language Bengali ( ), generally known by its endonym Bangla (, ), is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia. It is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken ...
just to the west of Southeast Asia also has numerical classifiers, even though it is an Indo-European language that does not share the other MSEA features. Bengali also lacks
gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most culture ...
, unlike most
Indo-European languages The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...
.


See also

*
Classification of Southeast Asian languages There have been various classification schemes for Southeast Asian languages (see the articles for the respective language families). Language families The five established major language families are: * Kra–Dai * Austronesian *Austroasiatic * Hm ...
*
East Asian languages The East Asian languages are a language family (alternatively ''macrofamily'' or ''superphylum'') proposed by Stanley Starosta in 2001. The proposal has since been adopted by George van Driem. Classifications Early proposals Early proposals of s ...
*
East Asian cultural sphere The East Asian cultural sphere, also known as the Sinosphere, the Sinic world, the Sinitic world, the Chinese cultural sphere, the Chinese character sphere encompasses multiple countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia that were historically ...
*
Southeast Asian Massif The term Southeast Asian Massif was proposed in 1997 by anthropologist Jean Michaud to discuss the human societies inhabiting the lands above approximately in the southeastern portion of the Asian landmass, thus not merely in the uplands of conven ...
* Tonogenesis *
Urheimat In historical linguistics, the homeland or ''Urheimat'' (, from German '' ur-'' "original" and ''Heimat'', home) of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the r ...


Notes


References

;Works cited * * * * * * * * * * *


Further reading

* {{citation , title = The topography of certain phonetic and morphological characteristics of South East Asian languages , first = Eugénie J.A. , last = Henderson , journal = Lingua , volume = 15 , year = 1965 , pages = 400–434 , doi = 10.1016/0024-3841(65)90020-3 , postscript = . , ref = none Languages of Southeast Asia Linguistic typology Sprachbund