Sino-Xenic vocabularies

Sino-Xenic vocabularies are large-scale and systematic borrowings of the Chinese lexicon into the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, none of which are genetically related to Chinese. The resulting Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies now make up a large part of the lexicons of these languages. The pronunciation systems for these vocabularies originated from conscious attempts to consistently approximate the original Chinese sounds while reading Classical Chinese. They are used alongside modern varieties of Chinese in historical Chinese phonology, particularly the reconstruction of the sounds of Middle Chinese. Some other languages, such as Hmong–Mien and Kra–Dai languages, also contain large numbers of Chinese loanwords but without the systematic correspondences that characterize Sino-Xenic vocabularies.

The term was coined in 1953 by the linguist Samuel E. Martin from the Greek ξένος (xénos, 'foreign'); Martin called these borrowings "Sino-Xenic dialects".

Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese are the most widespread examples of sinoxenic languages. Indeed, these languages, by importing the Chinese writing system (sinograms), were enriched with a new vocabulary from China. Little by little, this vocabulary of the classical (written) Chinese language penetrated the vernacular languages, to the point that today, including the words invented in Japan on the basis of Sino-Japanese readings of sinograms, 49% of the words found in the Japanese dictionary Shinsen-kokugo-jiten (新選国語辞典, 2002) are Sino-xenic, without including a part of the hybrid terms (8%) which, in a number of cases, contain at least one sinoxenic element. Nevertheless, their weight in terms of frequency of use, appears clearly lower, especially in the oral language; for example, a 1995 study of television shows shows a share of only 18% for Sino-xenic vocabulary. Everyday conversations see this share reduced even further, as a trend.