The East Asian countries of China, Japan and Korea (Republic of Korea, ROK) are unique in the modern world in that they continue (to varying degrees) to use a non-phonetic script. This is a reflection of their past, when they shared a common heritage in the form of shared use of Classical Chinese.

Until about 100 years ago, Classical Chinese was the language of the educated in these countries (and also in Vietnam), although the respective forms of the vernacular were used for everyday and literary purposes. However, the situation altered significantly in the first half of the twentieth century due to changes in language policy. The most dramatic differences are that Vietnam changed to the Roman alphabet in 1910 (Tuttle 1996, p. 691), and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) abolished the use of Chinese characters altogether in 1949 (King 1996, p. 219); there were various minor changes too.

As a result of more than a millennium of language contact, plus centuries of language modernisation using Chinese loan translations, China, Japan and Korea (as well as Vietnam) now have a large body of cognate vocabulary that is based on Chinese morphemes (for an example, see the section ‘Policy regarding foreign words’ below).

Any discussion of future developments of these East Asian languages needs to take into consideration two points:

• the degree to which there are shared elements in the vocabulary (and their written representation) of the three languages, and to what degree this is magnified or diminished by national language/script policy;

• the problems that non-phonetic writing systems cause for computer input (these issues are of varying magnitude, depending on the language).