Editing Chinese language (section)

=== Influence ===
{{See also|Adoption of Chinese literary culture|Sino-Xenic vocabularies}}
[[File:Tripitaka Koreana.jpg|thumb|right|The ''[[Tripitaka Koreana]]'', a Korean collection of the [[Chinese Buddhist canon]]]]

Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the [[Han dynasty]] (202&nbsp;BCE{{snd}}220&nbsp;CE) in 111&nbsp;BCE, marking the beginning of a [[Chinese domination of Vietnam|period of Chinese control]] that ran almost continuously for a millennium. The [[Four Commanderies of Han]] were established in northern Korea in the 1st century&nbsp;BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries.{{sfnp|Sohn|Lee|2003|p=23}} [[Chinese Buddhism]] spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries&nbsp;CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese.{{sfnp|Miller|1967|pp=29–30}} Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam.{{sfnp|Kornicki|2011|pp=75–77}} Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.{{sfnp|Kornicki|2011|p=67}}

Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as [[Sino-Xenic pronunciations]]. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the [[Korean language|Korean]], [[Japanese language|Japanese]] and [[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]] languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies.{{sfnp|Miyake|2004|pp=98–99}} This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of [[moraic]] structure in Japanese{{sfnp|Shibatani|1990|pp=120–121}} and the disruption of [[vowel harmony]] in Korean.{{sfnp|Sohn|2001|p=89}}

Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of [[Latin]] and [[Ancient Greek]] roots in European languages.{{sfnp|Shibatani|1990|p=146}} Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries.{{sfnp|Wilkinson|2000|p=43}} The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, [[Sino-Japanese words]] account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.{{sfnp|Shibatani|1990|p=143}}

Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on [[Chinese characters]], but later replaced with the {{tlit|ko|[[hangul]]}} alphabet for Korean and supplemented with {{tlit|ja|[[kana]]}} syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex {{lang|vi|[[chữ Nôm]]}} script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called [[kanji]], and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called [[hanja]] is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses the Latin-based [[Vietnamese alphabet]].

[[List of English words of Chinese origin|English words of Chinese origin]] include ''tea'' from [[Hokkien]] {{zhc|c=茶|poj=tê}}, ''[[dim sum]]'' from Cantonese {{zhc|c=點心|j=dim2 sam1}}, and ''[[kumquat]]'' from Cantonese {{zhc|c=金橘|j=gam1 gwat1}}.