Linguistic History And Affiliations Of Southeast Asia - Essay Example

Linguistic History And Affiliations Of Southeast Asia Language is the most powerful medium of expression and self identity. It is that tool with which a person belonging to a certain geographical area communicates and puts across a clear identification of his or her origin through nuances like accent, expressions, and dialects. Language is something without which a person is lost. This paper coves the languages that have emerged from the South East and East of Asia, like Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese and Burmese. I will be putting across a study of these languages in the following contexts: Genetic affiliations Main features of grammar and script Earliest use and achievement of national language status First, in light of the fact that in this part of the world, languages are known to be used as ‘language cultures’, it is imperative to define the broad area we will be studying. Moving South from North, the countries may be grouped as follows: (Goddard, 2005; p. 53) Indonesia, East Timor, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Phillipines Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia, Loas, and Vietnam China Korea and Japan In this context, let us discuss how many languages there are in this broad geographical area. While most people would not be able to come up a number more than twelve, the fact is that this would hold true if were to talk only about national languages. These languages being the official medium of communication for spheres concerning governance, education, and media, may be divided into Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu, Tetum and Portugese in East Timor, Philipino or Tagalog, Burmese, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese, Chinese (Modern Standard Chinese), Korean and Japanese. But the truth is that, if we are to delve deeper into the matter, we will find that the total number of languages is a lot greater than most of us can imagine. This is owing to the inclusion of hundreds of minority languages spoken in the hills and jungles, as well as the languages of the same figure spoken in China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and various other countries of this area. We will now proceed to analyse these languages along the lines enumerated above. Genetic Affiliations: From a genetic point of view, the languages of East and Southeast Asia are much more varied than those of Europe or America. To determine how many language families there are in this area, we would have to set aside various complications and say that there are basically six broad families. These are Austronesian, Mon – Khmer, Tai – Kadai, Tibeto – Burman, Sinitic, and Hmong Mein. Apart from these, there are several major languages whose ancestry is unclear like Japanese and Korean. Further, loan words also form an integral part of these languages as linguistic echoes of past cultural contact, where the nature of the loan words can speak volumes of the kind of contact enjoyed. The result of such theories when applied in this region is that languages that are not genetically related nevertheless share many features of language structure, the reason being that many languages in this region from different families have been in contact with one another for many years. In this way, they have mutually influenced each other in various ways. In fact, it can be said that most languages of mainland Southeast Asia fall into a single linguistic area on the basis of various similarities which cut across the genetic classification. These similarities also include important cultural ones across regions of East and Southeast. These similarities have left their influences in vocabulary and semantics, in social aspects of language use and even aspects of language structure. For example, many East and Southeast Asian languages have special forms of respectful or deferential language to be used when talking about people who are older or socially higher than oneself. Bahasa Indonesia is a language laced strongly with a hangover from its Hinduism days. The language originated from Sanskrit and Arabic with a clear demonstration of the fact that the Hindu influence of the second century BC and the Arabic influence of the fourteenth century, have left a strong mark on the language’s genetic affiliations. In this regard, the Austro-Asiatic languages may be defined as a large language family of Southeast Asia, and also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh. The name comes from the Latin word for "south" and the Greek name of Asia, hence "South Asia". Among these languages, only Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon have a long recorded history, and only Vietnamese and Khmer have official status (in Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively), with the rest of the languages are spoken by minority groups. On the other hand, Burmese and Thai are two languages that are very functional in their structuring and grammar. The genetic affiliations of both the languages lie in their Palaungic roots of the Khasi Khumic languages, which even accommodates Mang of Vietnam. This affiliation is based on the percentage of shared vocabulary which means that a language may appear to be more distantly related than it actually is due to language contact, so it is only a starting point for a proper genealogical classification.A subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, Burmese is close to Thai, which some linguists link with the Austroasiatic, Austronesian, or Sino-Tibetan language families. The majority of Burmese vocabulary is of Tibeto-Burman stock. However, the Burmese language has been influenced by Pali, English, and Mon, and to a lesser extent, by Chinese, Sanskrit and Hindi. Pali loan words are often related to religion, government, arts, and science. There are some loan words from Mon, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Hindi, but they are found less abundantly in Burmese. The same could be said for Thai, although Old Khmer has also contributed its share, especially in regard to royal court terminology. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai-Kadai language family. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, English has had the greatest influence on this language. Main Features of Grammar and Script: Moving onto the grammar of these languages, it would be imperative to start out by saying that language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family. Thus, the grammar of any language is an important determinant of the family it shares. While Bahasa Indonesian makes use of a lot of affixes and virtually no grammatical gender, plurals are expressed by means of reduplication. Further, there are only two kinds of negation here, which are tidak (for negation of a verb) and bukan (for negation of a noun). Verbs are not inflected for person or number, and they are not marked for tense; tense is instead denoted by time adverbs (such as "yesterday") or by other tense indicators, such as sudah, "already". On the other hand, there is a complex system of verb affixes to render nuances of meaning and denote active-passive voices. Indonesian is written using the Latin alphabet. Further, it is more phonetically consistent than many languages—the correspondence between sounds and their written forms is generally regular. The word order of the Burmese language is subject-object-verb. The only exception to this rule is the verb 'to be'. This is placed directly after the subject. Pronouns in Burmese vary according to the gender and status of the audience, while adjectives may precede a noun. Burmese is monosyllabic, that is, every word is a root to which a particle but not another word may be prefixed. Sentence structure determines syntactical relations, and verbs are not conjugated but have particles suffixed to them. The Burmese script is characterised by its circular letters and diacritics. The grammar of this language is an abugida, with all letters having an inherent vowel where tone markings are in the form of diacritics placed to the left, right, top, and bottom of letters. These are not always indicative of the proper tone. (www.wikipedia.com) From the perspective of linguistic typology, Thai can be considered to be an analytic language. The word order is Subject Verb Object, although the subject is often omitted. The Thai pronominal system varies according to the sex and relative status of speaker and audience, with adjectives following the nouns and verbs being devoid of inflection or participles. The Thai alphabet derived from the Khmer alphabet (อักขระเขมร), which is modeled after the Brahmic script from the Indic family. Much like the Burmese adopted the Mon script (which also has Indic origins), the Thais adopted and modified Khmer script to create their own writing system. (www.wikipedia.com) Like many languages in Southeast Asia and Chinese, Vietnamese is an analytic (or isolating) language, with its grammar depending on word order and sentence structure rather than morphology (in which word changes through inflection). Vietnamese uses grammatical particles or syntactic constructions and is often erroneously considered to be a "monosyllabic" language. A notable feature is that Vietnamese has many words that consist of only one syllable although, most words are disyllabic. This is owing to the large number of reduplication words that appear in household vocabulary, or adjectives. More accurately, most morphemes are monosyllabic. Vietnamese syntax conforms to the Subject Verb Object word order. Presently, the written language uses the Vietnamese alphabet (quốc ngữ or "national script," literally "national language," from Chinese 國語 / guoyu), based on the Latin alphabet, with the script reflecting a so-called Middle Vietnamese dialect that consists of vowels and final consonants which are similar to northern dialects and initial consonants most similar to southern dialects. (www.wikipedia.com) Earliest use and achievement of national language status: Indonesian is a normative form of the Malay language, an Austronesian (or Malayo-Polynesian) language which had been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries, and was elevated to the status of official language with the Indonesian declaration of independence in 1945, drawing inspiration from the Sumpah Pemuda (Youth's Oath) event in 1928. Burmese is the official language of Myanmar. Although the government officially recognises the language as Myanmar, most continue to refer to the language as Burmese. It is the mother tongue of the Bamar, Rakhine, and other related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar and is spoken by 32 million as a first language, and as a second language by minorities in Myanmar. Thai, on the other hand, is the national and official language of Thailand and the mother tongue of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. The Tai-Kadai languages are thought to have originated in what is now southern China, and some linguists have proposed links to the Austroasiatic, Austronesian, or Sino-Tibetan language families. Vietnamese was identified more than 150 years ago to be part of the Viet-Muong (or Vietic) grouping of the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family. With its ancestor originally based in the area of the Red River in what is now northern Vietnam, Vietnamese was linguistically influenced primarily by Indic and Malayo-Polynesian languages at first, until Chinese came to predominate politically toward the middle of the first millennium C.E. While spoken by the Vietnamese people for millennia, Vietnamese did not become the official administrative language of Vietnam until the 20th century and it was not until independence from France that Vietnamese was used officially. References Cited: 1. Goddard, Cliff. The Languages of East and Southeast Asia – An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2005 2. Google Inc. URL: www.google.com (Accessed on: 11th November, 2006) 3. Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia. URL: www.wikipedia.com (Accessed on: 11th November, 2006) Read More