East Asian languages belong to several language families that are generally believed to be genetically unrelated, but share many features due 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 first millennium AD, Chinese culture came to dominate east Asia. Literary Chinese was adopted by scholars in Vietnam, Korea and Japan, and there was a massive influx of Chinese vocabulary into these and other neighbouring languages. The Chinese script was also adapted to write Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese.
Read more about East Asian Languages: Language Families, Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area
Famous quotes containing the words east, asian and/or languages:
“I know no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“Wealth is so much the greatest good that Fortune has to bestow that in the Latin and English languages it has usurped her name.”
—William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)