Sino-Tibetan Languages

I

Introduction

Sino-Tibetan Languages, a family of languages spoken in China, parts of Southeast Asia, and along the Himalayas, a mountain system in south central Asia. It is the world’s second largest language family in number of speakers, surpassed only by the Indo-European language family, which includes English and most European languages. The Sino-Tibetan language family consists of about 200 languages in two major subfamilies: Chinese, or Sinitic languages, and Tibeto-Burman. The Tibeto-Burman subfamily comprises many more languages than the Chinese subfamily, but Chinese languages are spoken by many more people.

Although they are all written in the same system, the main variants of Chinese are not considered dialects. Linguists classify these variants as separate languages on the basis of differences in their vocabularies and pronunciation. These differences are similar to those found among Romance languages—for example, French, Italian, and Spanish.

II

Chinese Subfamily

The major language in the Chinese subfamily is Mandarin Chinese. With more than 870 million speakers, it is spoken by more people than any other language in the world. Other Chinese languages, such as Wu, Cantonese, Gan, Xiang, Hakka, Yue, and Min, have tens of millions of speakers. Chinese languages are spoken throughout China, in parts of central Asia, and in Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

III

The Tibeto-Burman Subfamily

The major languages in the Tibeto-Burman subfamily are Tibetan, which is the dominant language in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, and Burmese, which is the national language of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). Other languages in this subfamily are spoken in Bhutan, Nepal, Thailand, northern Pakistan, Sikkim and other parts of India, and the Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.

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In terms of speakers, Burmese, with 32 million, is the largest language in the group. Tibetan and Yi, a language spoken in the mountains of southern Sichuan and Yunnan provinces in China, each have about 6.6 million and 1.3 million speakers, respectively. (Yi was formerly known as Lolo, a term that some speakers of the language now consider derogatory.) A few other Tibeto-Burman languages have as many as 1 million speakers, but some have only a few hundred.

IV

Origins

Linguists believe that languages in the Sino-Tibetan family are related, having a common ancestral language. The distribution of these languages indicates that they spread along the many rivers that have their headwaters in an area of eastern China where the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan meet Tibet. These rivers include the Yalong, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Hwang Ho, and Brahmaputra. As groups of people who spoke the ancestral languages became isolated from one another, the different languages in the Sino-Tibetan family developed.

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