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The most spoken language families on the continent include Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Japonic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan, Kra–Dai and Koreanic. Many languages of Asia, such as Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Tamil or Telugu, have a long history as a written language.
For most of the pre-modern period, Chinese culture dominated East Asia. Scholars in Vietnam, Korea and Japan wrote in Literary Chinese and were thoroughly familiar with the Chinese classics. Their languages absorbed large numbers of Chinese words, known collectively as Sino-Xenic vocabulary, i.e. Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese.
According to Michael D. Larish, the languages of Southeast and East Asia descended from one proto-language (which he calls "Proto-Asian"). Japonic is grouped together with Koreanic as one branch of the Proto-Asian family. The other branch consists of the Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Kra-Dai, Hmong-Mien and Sino-Tibetan languages.
Linguists traditionally recognize two primary divisions of Austroasiatic: the Mon–Khmer languages of Southeast Asia, Northeast India and the Nicobar Islands, and the Munda languages of East and Central India and parts of Bangladesh and Nepal. However, no evidence for this classification has ever been published.
The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. [1] Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological ...
South Asia is home to several hundred languages, spanning the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It is home to the third most spoken language in the world, Hindi–Urdu; and the sixth most spoken language, Bengali. The languages in the region mostly comprise Indo-Iranic and Dravidian ...
Extinct languages of Asia (18 C, 153 P) G. Gulf Arabic (6 P) I. Indigenous languages of Asia (8 C, 1 P) L. Language isolates of Asia (7 C, 15 P)
Taiwan's long colonial and immigration history brought in several languages such as Dutch, Spanish, Hokkien, Hakka, Japanese, and Mandarin. Due to the former Japanese occupation of the island, the Japanese language has influenced the languages of Taiwan, particularly in terms of vocabulary, with many loanwords coming from Japanese.