The vast majority of East Asian languages are related to many language families. Chinese seems to be one of the most dominant root languages especially across Mainland Southeast Asia owing to the various linguistic features shared amongst them including tone and syllable. Chinese influence comes as no surprise as Chinese culture dominated the area through the first millennium AD. Scholars actively adopted literary Chinese in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. All that adoption meant a rapid influx of mainly Chinese vocabulary which fused with native languages. One of the most notable influence is the Chinese script which was adapted to write Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean though in Korea and Vietnam the use of Chinese characters has been restricted to just use in university learning, historical study, artistic work or linguistics.
Literary Chinese Influences on East Asian Languages
The absorption of Chinese words into Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese created a Sino-Xenic vocabulary. Many words were written using Chinese characters and were pronounced using local approximation which was near Middle Chinese.
Today much of the Chinese origin words are written in simplified Chinese mainly in Japan and China. A locally developed script called kana in Japan and hangul in Korea is used with Latin alphabets. The collection of Korean, Japanese and Chinese languages is referred to as CJK because modern day Vietnamese does not use Chinese characters like it once did.
Similar to how Latin and Greek was used in English, the morphemes from Classical Chinese continue to be used extensively in almost all East Asian Languages. Morphemes were primarily used to coin compound words for new ideas or concepts. The coinages were written in characters of both Chinese and native languages. Interestingly, Chinese despite being resistant towards adopting loanwords have accepted these terms. So, the adoption has in some manner worked both ways.
Use of the Politeness systems
Politeness in linguistic systems uses various degrees of respect or politeness which is well developed in both Korean and Japanese. However, the politeness systems are weak in Chinese because it uses a very simplified form distilled from more developed systems especially in southern Chinese dialects. Of all East Asian languages, Vietnamese has managed to retain its complex system of well-structured pronouns using terms derived from Chinese. Take for instance terms like, chú, cậu dượng, and bác all of which have been derived from Chinese and refer to the status of “uncle” in English.
Many regional languages like Thai, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean, new variations of personal pronouns or various forms of references to address evolve from nouns and are used to express social status and respect. Personal pronouns are not stable over time and are thus open class words. Modern trends and language modernization have meant that politeness systems need to become simpler. So complex polite language may motivate the use of other languages like English and Indonesian which have less complex politeness linguistics.
Interestingly, all East Asian languages are still evolving with Chinese being the top most. Technology is the biggest influencer as is the fact that fluid communications with other parts of the world dictate language simplification.