II.

General Characteristics

Chinese—together with Tibetan, Burmese, and many other languages of South and Southeast Asia—belongs to the family of Sino-Tibetan languages (see Language). Besides a core vocabulary and sounds, Chinese and many related languages share features that distinguish them from most Western languages: They have even less inflection than the English language and are tonal. In order to indicate differences in meaning between words similar in sound, tonal languages assign to words a distinctive relative pitch—high or low—or a distinctive pitch contour—level, rising, or falling.