Sino-Tibetan

Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (6 million). Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.

Several low-level subgroups have been securely reconstructed, but reconstruction of a proto-language for the family as a whole is still at an early stage, so the higher-level structure of Sino-Tibetan remains unclear. Although the family is traditionally presented as divided into Sinitic (i.e. Chinese languages) and Tibeto-Burman branches, a common origin of the non-Sinitic languages has never been demonstrated.

Early classifications included the Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages in the Sino-Tibetan language family. This grouping continues to be supported by Chinese linguists, but has been rejected by the international community since the 1940s, who instead attribute the similarities to sprachbund effects of areal convergence and early borrowing. Several links to other Southeast Asian language families have been proposed, but none have broad acceptance.

From Wikipedia · Sino-Tibetan languages · CC BY-SA 4.0