The “Sinosphere”

A. Southeastern Asia contains several distinct language families. The southern Chinese varieties, such as Cantonese, belong to the SinoTibetan family. Thai and Laotian are members of a different family called Tai-Kadai. Vietnamese and Cambodian are members of yet another family, Austroasiatic, and there are also scattered small languages, such as Hmong, part of a family called Miao-Yao.

B. Yet all these languages are based on a common “game plan.” We saw some of it in Cantonese, with its particles at the end of sentences that convey attitude and its classifiers used with numbers, such as our two head of cattle instead of two cattle. But there are many other features typical across these families. A language of this area tends to be tonal, to have no gender marking or case marking, to have most words consist of a single syllable instead of two or more, and so on.

C. This phenomenon can be partly explained by the fact that Chinese speakers conquered and migrated southward, lending parts of their grammar to the languages they encountered. But the process went both ways: Chinese in the south became more like the languages it encountered, as well.

D. As a result, on first glance, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong appear to trace to a common ancestor, being so unlike other language families and so similar to one another. But actually, the resemblance is due to millennia of constant grammar sharing. Linguist James Matisoff has termed this language area a “Sinosphere.”