Southeast Asia, a term used since World War II, consists of the regions south of China and east of India which includes Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Kampuchea (Cambodia), Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Between these countries, their languages differ tremendously even though some scholars have suggested that all the different languages are related to the Indo-Pacific Family.
Approximately one thousand unintelligible languages are spoken in Southeast Asia, of which only the major national and regional languages have writing systems and literary traditions. With an exception, there are nine major languages spoken. These languages consists of Sinitic, or Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, Karen, Miao-Yao, Tai, Malayo-Polynesian, Mon-Khmer, Viet-Muong, and Papuan. The first five languages are classified as "Sino-Tibetan".
The Sino-Tibetan language family consists of the Sinitic, or Chinese language, all spoken in China and major little cities like Singapore, Bangkok, and Manila. Another language in this category is the Tibeto-Burman. Among the Tibeto-Burman languages are Burmese, the official language of Burma, and the dominant language of Tibet. The majority of the Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken by small hill-dwelling tribal groups, and a larger number of this language is spoken by small communities in Northern Burma and eastern Tibet. Most of the Tibeto-Burman languages are still unwritten, but several have similar alphabets adapted from the Indian tradition.
The Tibeto-Burman languages show much more structural diversity than the Chinese languages. In Chinese, the word order of sentences is "subject-verb-object", just as in English, but as for the Tibeto-Burman languages, the order is "subject-object-verb". Many Tibeto-Burman languages are tone languages in which differences in pitch and pitch contour can change the meanings of words.
Karen languages, on the other hand, is similar to the Chinese language. This language structure their word order of sentences in a "subject-verb-object" fashion similar to English. Karen languages are spoken by small minorities on both sides of the Thai-Burmese border. The Karen languages are rarely used. A lot of the people will tend to speak the dominant language of their country. Another non dominating language spoken is the Miao-Yao languages, now sometimes called the Hmong-Mien languages, are found in Northern Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. These languages are spoken by small numbers of recent immigrants from Southern China. Majority of the people living in Thailand will tend to speak the dominant language of Thai, people living in Laos will speak the dominant language of Lao, and people living in the Vietnam region will speak their official language of Vietnamese plus a little of French, Chinese, English, Khmer, tribal languages and Malayo-Polynesian. The Miao-Yao languages will be heard spoken all over these three countries, but this language won't be found to be the dominant of any country.
The Malayo-Polynesian family, also called Austronesian, spreads as wide as a third of the way around the globe, from Taiwan, and includes such national languages as Malay in Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia, and Tagalog or Philipino in the Philippines, as well as hundreds of other minority languages within these countries.
Even though there may seem like there are so many different languages spoken in Southeast Asia, but what ties all these languages together is that they all fall into two groups: A monosyllabic and disyllabic. The Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman, Karen, Miao-Yao, Tai and Viet-Muong tend to monosyllabic and tonal, relying on word order for their meaning. On the other hand, there's Malayo-Polynesian, Mon-khmer, and Papuan which is disyllabic and non tonal making use of grammatical endings. Southeast Asian Languages as a whole are described and acknowledged by their complex systems of personal pronouns, a high degree of "semantic specialization" in the verb, and the use of classifiers in numerical noun phrases.
All languages have their own dialects and pronunciation, but on the whole, they are all related in some ways. Just look at our English language. We have borrowed words from all over the world and integrated it into our own language. Southeast Asian countries may not have derived their languages in the same pronunciation but they do indeed have the same uses of grammar structure.
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