Östasiatiska

Östasiatiska is a Swedish adjective used to refer to East Asia and things associated with its people, cultures, languages, history, and region. In Swedish usage, the term is common in academic, journalistic, and educational contexts to distinguish East Asia from other parts of Asia and from Southeast Asia or Central Asia. The designation is geographic-cultural, not a political unit.

Geography: East Asia typically includes the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Japan, the Koreas (North and South Korea), and Mongolia. Some analyses extend the scope to adjacent borderlands or to include parts of Inner Asia; others focus more narrowly on the core countries listed above.

Culture and history: East Asian civilizations have long histories with shared and diverging traditions, including philosophies such as Confucianism and Buddhism, influences on art, literature, and cuisine, and periods of rapid modernization in the 19th–21st centuries. The region has been central to global trade, technology, and cultural exchange.

Language and linguistics: East Asian languages encompass several families and writing systems. Chinese varieties (Sinitic) form one branch; Japonic languages include Japanese; Koreanic languages include Korean; some East Asian languages belong to Mongolic and other groups. Written Chinese characters have influenced scripts used in Japanese and historically in Korea, though modern Korean uses Hangul. The linguistic classification of East Asian languages is an area of ongoing scholarly debate, with various groupings used in different fields.

Usage: The term appears in studies of history, anthropology, linguistics, and regional policy. It helps define a regional perspective distinct from other Asian subregions and from the broader Asian continent.