Portal:Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia

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Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia

An index of literature translated from Asian languages and works about the languages themselves.

Photograph of Chinese writing in black ink. "Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion" by Wang Xizhi
Chinese

Altaic languages

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Map of Asia and Europe with Altaic language-speaking areas highlighted in green. Three major areas can be seen, roughly corresponding to Turkey, Central Asia and North Asia, or Northern Russia/Siberia.
Altaic languages

Altaic is a proposed language family that is held by its proponents to include the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and possibly the Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe (Turks, Kalmyks). The group is named after the Altai Mountains, a mountain range in Central Asia.

Turkish

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Uyghur

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Manchu

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Ainu

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Japanese

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See also Japanese Wikisource

Japanese is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists.

Language

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Literature

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Korean

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See also Korean Wikisource

Korean is the official language of Korea, both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing system was commissioned by Sejong the Great, the system being currently called Hangul.

Chinese

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See also Chinese Wikisource and Min Nan Wikisource

Chinese, or the Sinitic language(s), is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (50 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility.

Language

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Range of dialect groups in China proper and Taiwan according to the Language Atlas of China, S. A. Wurm, R. Li, T. Baumann, & Mei W. Lee (1987).

Cantonese (Yue)

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Southern Min (Minnan)

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Fujian (Quan-Zhang, Hokkien)
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Chaozhou (Teochew)
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Shantou (Swatow)
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Eastern Min (Mindong)

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Fuzhou (Foochow, Hokchew)
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Hakka

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Literature

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See Portal:Chinese literature
See also Portal:Chinese classics

Vietnamese

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Burmese

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The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Burmese is the native language of the Bamar and related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar, as well as that of some ethnic minorities in Burma like the Mon.

Thai

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See Portal:Thai language
See also Thai Wikisource

Dravidian languages

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The Dravidian languages are a language family spoken mainly in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and overseas in other countries such as Malaysia and Singapore. The most populous Dravidian languages are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam.

See Portal:Dravidian languages and literature