Reflections | How Chinese influenced, and was influenced by, other Asian languages

At a recent dinner party – the size of which conformed to the numbers allowed that week – a guest dismissed her country’s national language as “not a real language” because it contained many words borrowed from the language of another land. Her attitude, which surprised me, might have been informed by being forced to use a national language at school, rather than the vernacular that she, a member of an ethnic minority group, spoke at home with her family. While I am sympathetic to those who are forced to learn in an unfamiliar tongue, I do not agree that foreign loanwords make any language less “real”.

In a modern Japanese dictionary, around 60 per cent of the entries are kango, literally “Chinese words”, which originated in Chinese or were created from its linguistic elements. Hanja-eo, or Korean words of Chinese origin, account for almost 60 per cent of all Korean vocabulary. Modern Vietnamese features a large Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, or tu han viet, ranging from one- to two-thirds of any discourse depending on context and the degree of formality.

It would be absurd to suggest Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese are not “real languages” because large portions of their lexicons originated in Chinese. We have not even included the many loanwords from European languages, especially English, which have been incorporated in recent times. The Chinese language – historically the major source of words for several Asian languages and to a lesser extent European languages (tea, to lose face) – is itself a borrower of foreign words and expressions.

Foreign loanwords arrived in China in at least five different waves. The first two, during the 2nd century and the Sui and Tang periods (581-907), coincided with the introduction of Buddhism from the Indian subcontinent and its proliferation in China. Many Buddhist texts were translated from Sanskrit to Chinese, especially in the Tang dynasty, which brought words of Indian origin into China’s lexical orbit.

The third wave occurred during the trading boom in the Song period (960-1279), when China conducted high volumes of maritime trade with Southeast Asia and the littoral nations of the Indian Ocean. The next wave of loanwords arrived with European Catholic missionaries in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), while the ongoing fifth wave, from the late 19th century to the present, has seen the biggest influx of foreign words.