Besides Chinese/Sinitic languages, Japanese/Japonic languages, Korean, and Vietnamese language (Chữ nôm), a number of smaller Asian languages have been written or continue to be written using Han characters, with characters modified from Han characters, or using Han characters in combination with native characters. They include:

• Bai language
• Dong language
• Iu Mien language
• Jurchen language, Jurchen script
• Khitan language, Khitan script
• Miao language
• Nakhi (Naxi) language (Geba script)
• Tangut language, Tangut script
• Zhuang language (using Zhuang logograms, or "sawndip")

In addition, the Yi script is similar to Han, but is not known to be directly related to it.

Mongolian text from The Secret History of the Mongols in Chinese transcription, with a glossary on the right of each row

Along with Persian and Arabic, Chinese characters were also used as a foreign script to write the Mongolian language, where characters were used to phonetically transcribe Mongolian sounds. Before the 13th century and the establishment of the Mongolian script, foreign scripts such as Chinese had to be used to write the Mongolian language. Most notably, the only surviving copies of The Secret History of the Mongols were written in such a manner; the Chinese characters 忙豁侖紐察 脫[卜]察安 (Pinyin: mánghuōlúnniǔchá tuō[bo]chá'ān) is the rendering of Mongγol-un niγuca tobčiyan, the title in Mongolian.

Historical spread

The Vietnamese Hán tự were first used in Vietnam during the millennium of Chinese rule starting in 111 BC, while adaptation for the vernacularChữ Nôm script (based on Chinese characters) emerged around the 13th century AD.

The oldest known record of the Sawndip characters used by the Zhuang, a non-Han peoples from what is today known as Guangxi, is from a stele dating from 689, which predates the earliest example of Vietnamese chữ Nôm.

The Chinese script spread to Korea together with Buddhism from the 7th century (Hanja). The Japanese Kanji were adopted for recording the Japanese language from the 8th century AD.