Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area

TheMainland Southeast Asia linguistic areais asprachbundincluding languages of theSino-Tibetan,Hmong–Mien(or Miao–Yao),Kra–Dai,AustronesianandAustroasiaticfamilies spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China.^[1]Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion.^[2]James Matisoffreferred to this area as the "Sinosphere",contrasted with the"Indosphere",but viewed it as a zone of mutual influence in the ancient period.^[3]

Language distribution

The Austroasiatic languages includeVietnameseandKhmer,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.^[4]

Chinese civilization and theChinese languagespread from their home in theNorth China Plaininto the Yangtze valley and then into southern China during the first millennium BC and first millennium AD. Indigenous groups in these areas eitherbecame Chinese,retreated to the hill country,or migrated to the south. Thus the Kra–Dai languages, today includingThai,LaoandShan,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 ofZhuang,most of the Kra–Dai languages still remaining in China are spoken in isolated upland areas.^[5]Similarly the Hmong–Mien languages may originally have been spoken in the middleYangtze.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 inGuizhou.^[6]

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, theTibeto-Burman languages.The Austronesian languages, spoken across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, are represented in MSEA by the divergentChamic group.

The far southern Sinitic languagesCantoneseandPinghuaare also part of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, as demonstrated by Hilário de Sousa (2015).^[7]

Mark Post (2015)^[8]observes that theTani languagesofArunachal Pradesh,Northeast Indiatypologically fit into the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, which typically has creoloid morphosyntactic patterns,^[9]rather than with the languages of the Tibetosphere. Post (2015) also notes that Tani culture is similar to those of Mainland Southeast Asianhill tribecultures, and is not particularly adapted to cold montane environments.

David Gil (2015)^[10]considers the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area to be part of the largerMekong-Mamberamo linguistic area,which also includes languages inIndonesiawest of theMamberamo River.

Syllable structure

A characteristic of MSEA languages is a particular syllable structure involvingmonosyllabic morphemes,lexical tone,a fairly large inventory of consonants, including phonemicaspiration,limited clusters at the beginning of a syllable, and plentiful vowel contrasts. Final consonants are typically highly restricted, often limited to glides and nasals orunreleased stopsat 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.^[11]

Most MSEA languages tend to have monosyllabic morphemes, but there are exceptions.^[12] 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 theMon–Khmer languages,is thesesquisyllable(fromLatin:sesqui-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 aneutral vowel/ə/.^[12]That structure is present in many conservative Mon–Khmer languages such asKhmer(Cambodian), as well as inBurmese,and it is reconstructed for the older stages of a number ofSino-Tibetan languages.

Tone systems

Phonemic toneis 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 havedevelopedin the same way.

Origin of tonal contrasts

The tone systems ofMiddle Chinese,proto-Hmong–Mien,proto-Taiand early Vietnamese all display a three-way tonal contrast in syllables lackingstopendings. In traditional analyses, syllables ending in stops have been treated as a fourth or "checked tone",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:^[13]^[14]^[15]

Vietnamese^[a]	proto-Tai	proto-Hmong–Mien	Middle Chinese	suggested origin
A (ngang-huyền*)	*A	*A	Bìnhpíng"level"	-
B (sắc-nặng*)	*C	*B	Thượngshǎng"rising"	*-ʔ
C (hỏi-ngã*)	*B	*C	Điqù"departing"	-h < -s

The incidence of these tones in Chinese, Tai and Hmong–Mien words follows a similar ratio 2:1:1.^[17] Thusrhyme dictionariessuch as theQieyundivide 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.^[17]

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 1954André-Georges Haudricourtsolved 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 astonogenesis. 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 thatOld Chinesewas atonal.^[15] A smaller amount of similar evidence has been found for proto-Tai.^[18] 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.^[19]

Loss of voicing with tone or register split

A characteristicsound change(aphonemic split) 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 asWu Chinese,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.^[20] PinghuaandYue Chinese,as well as neighbouring Tai languages, have further tone splits in checked syllables, while many other Chinese varieties, includingMandarin Chinese,have merged some tonal categories.

Many non-tonal languages instead developed a register split, with voiced consonants producingbreathy-voicedvowels and unvoiced consonants producingnormally voicedvowels. Often, the breathy-voiced vowels subsequently went through additional, complex changes (e.g. diphthongization). Examples of languages affected this way areMonandKhmer(Cambodian). Breathy voicing has since been lost in standard Khmer, although the vowel changes triggered by it still remain.^[21]

Many of these languages have subsequently developed some voiced obstruents. The most common such sounds are/b/and/d/(often pronounced with some implosion), which result from former preglottalized/ʔb/and/ʔd/,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, unstressedminor syllable,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 theisolatingtype, with mostly mono-morphemic words, noinflectionand littleaffixation. Nouns are derived by compounding; for example,Mandarin Chineseis rich in polysyllabic words. Grammatical relations are typically signalled by word order,particlesandcoverbsorprepositions. Modalityis expressed usingsentence-final particles. The usual word order in MSEA languages issubject–verb–object. Chinese,BaiandKarenare thought to have changed to this order from thesubject–object–verborder retained by most other Sino-Tibetan languages. The order of constituents within a noun phrase varies: noun–modifier order is usual inTaiandHmongic languages,while in Chinese varieties andMienic languagesmost modifiers are placed before the noun.^[22]^[23] Topic-commentorganization is also common.^[24]

MSEA languages typically have well-developed systems ofnumeral classifiers.^[25] TheBengali languagejust 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 lacksgender,unlike mostIndo-European languages.

Notes

^In the laterSino-Vietnameselayer of loans, the correspondence of *B and *C is reversed.^[16]

References

^Sidwell, Paul; Jenny, Mathias, eds. (2021).The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia(PDF).De Gruyter.doi:10.1515/9783110558142.ISBN 978-3-11-055814-2.
^Enfield (2005),pp. 182–184.
^Matisoff (1991),p. 486.
^Sidwell & Blench (2011),pp. 339–340.
^Ramsey (1987),p. 233.
^Ramsey (1987),pp. 278–279.
^de Sousa, Hilário. 2015. ‘The Far Southern Sinitic languages as part of Mainland Southeast Asia.’ In N. J. Enfield and B. Comrie, Eds.Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art.Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.
^Post, M. W. 2015. ‘Morphosyntactic reconstruction in an areal-historical context: A pre-historical relationship between North East India and Mainland Southeast Asia?’ In N. J. Enfield and B. Comrie, Eds.Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art.Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter: 205 – 261.
^McWhorter, John H. 2007.Language Interrupted: Signs of non-native acquisition in standard language grammars.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
^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.
^Enfield (2005),pp. 186–187.
^^a ^bEnfield (2005),p. 186.
^Downer (1963).
^Luo (2008),p. 11.
^^a ^bNorman (1988),p. 56.
^Sagart (1986),p. 101.
^^a ^bBallard (1985),p. 171.
^Gedney (1989).
^Ratliff (2002).
^Norman (1988),p. 53.
^Enfield (2005),pp. 192–193.
^Enfield (2005),pp. 187–190.
^Ramsey (1987),p. 280.
^Enfield (2005),pp. 189–190.
^Enfield (2005),p. 189.

Works cited

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