It is generally accepted by linguists that, if two spoken languages are not directly communicable, they can be defined as two different languages.
Official language of Vietnam – Vietnamese
Although languages in most of the Southeast Asian countries have been under great impact from Indian culture, Vietnamese, like Korean and Japanese, have been influenced hugely by the culture of Chinese characters.
Hierarchical Language – Japanese
Japanese is a language spoken mainly by the Yamato people in Japanese archipelago, and is also the official and the most common language in Japan.
Birth of Old Malay – Bahasa Melayu
The 7th century saw the birth of Old Malay in South Sumatra. Old Malay had a lot of loanwords from Sanskrit and was widely used as a trade language. After the 14th century, there were dialects emerging in Malaya, Jakarta and Ambon. During then, the language spoken on the islands of South Pacific was simplified Malay. The Standard Malay spoken in Malaysia is also called Malaysian, which is different from Indonesian in some basic vocabularies, pronunciation, certain tense and sentence structure.
Differences between “North Korean” and “South Korean”
Korean is the official language of South Korea, while in North Korea (Chosŏn) it is called Chosŏnmal (Chosŏn Language). Both refer to the same language.
What is Simplified Chinese?
The variation in language-using habit also exists between mainland China, Singapore and other places where Simplified Chinese are used.