Shongese

Shongese (Shongese: Shongchuagyo) is an East Asian language spoken by over 20 million speakers, primarily in Shongan where it is the national language. Shongese is the only East Asian national language outside of East Asia. It is largely a language isolate, however has close grammatical links with Chinese and Korean, while a large amount of its phonology is linked with Japanese.

Little is known of the language's history, its first documented words were believed to be written in the 5th century. The language has changed marginally since the 8th century and shares many linguistic traits with Altaic Languages such as Korean and debatably, Japanese. Despite its distance, Shongese has been influenced by Chinese during the 12th and 13th centuries.

Shongese has minor agglutinative tendencies, has a monopthong (pure) vowel system, and has phonemic vowel and consonant length. Shongese is written using a syllabic writing system, known as Shichou, which consists of characters dervied and borrowed from Chinese Characters and Katakana.

Consonants
Digraphs
 * /th/
 * /dz/
 * /sh/
 * /ch/