Sino-Xenic pronunciations

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Sino-Xenic or Sinoxenic pronunciations are regular systems for reading Chinese characters in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, originating in medieval times and the source of large-scale borrowings of Chinese words into the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, none of which are genetically related to the Sinitic languages. 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 are used alongside modern Chinese languages' in historical Chinese phonology, particularly the reconstruction of the sounds of Middle Chinese.^[1][2] 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, from the Greek ξένος (xénos, 'foreign'), was coined in 1953 by the linguist Samuel Martin, who called these borrowings "Sino-Xenic dialects".^[2][3][4]