The languages of Southeast Asia

The Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) linguistic area is made up of languages spoken in Southeast Asia and China, including Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese, Hmong, and the Chinese languages.
In a previous post, we saw how languages in a linguistic area (e.g. the Altaic languages) come to resemble each other, if enough of speakers are familiar with other neighbouring languages over a long period of time. This appears to also be what has happened with the MSEA languages.
Like the Altaic languages, the MSEA languages share many general traits, including
1. Monosyllabic words, with few or no affixes.
2. Subject-verb-object word order, like in English (e.g. I ate dinner).
3. Tone used to distinguish between words ( “lexical tone”).
4. Frequent use of topic-comment sentence structure (e.g. [the cake] [I’ve eaten it all]).
5. Widespread use of classifiers (e.g. five [pieces] of paper).
6. Sentence-final particles indicating the speaker’s tone or intent (e.g. Cantonese za4: Five dollar za4? “Only five dollars???”)
7. Few syllable-final consonants, but numerous syllable-initial consonants and vowels.
Historically, the MSEA languages developed in a region where many different ethnic groups lived very close to each other. Intermarriage and multilingualism was the norm, to the point that people could assume different ethnic identities in different settings.
In this environment, many linguistic traits became common to many different languages in the area, even though these languages belong to five different language families. For example, Vietnamese, a Mon-Khmer language, has taken on MSEA traits that distinguish it from other Mon-Khmer languages, especially those spoken closer to India.
Linguistic areas like the MSEA show that languages are not only shaped by their ancestral languages, but can also be significantly affected by unrelated neighbouring languages. Languages do not have genes that determine their structure, but are rather continually open to the influence of other languages.
References
“Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia” by Nick Enfield
The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C. Scott
Language Interrupted by John McWhorter
Photo by Prof. Sarah Turner (McGill)
