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Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, 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 and the Tibetic languages. 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.
James Alan Matisoff is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia.
Dulong or Drung, Derung, Rawang, or Trung, is a Sino-Tibetan language in China. Dulong is closely related to the Rawang language of Myanmar (Burma). Although almost all ethnic Derung people speak the language to some degree, most are multilingual, also speaking Burmese, Lisu, and Mandarin Chinese except for a few very elderly people.
The Karen or Karenic languages are tonal languages spoken by some 4.5 million Karen people. They are of unclear affiliation within the Sino-Tibetan languages. The Karen languages are written using the Karen script. The three main branches are Sgaw, Pwo and Pa'O. Karenni and Kayan are a branch of Karen languages. They are unusual among the Sino-Tibetan languages in having a subject–verb–object word order; other than Karen, Bai and the Chinese languages, Sino-Tibetan languages have a subject–object–verb order. This is likely due to influence from neighboring Mon and Tai languages.
The Gyalrongic languages constitute a branch of the Qiangic languages of Sino-Tibetan, but some propose that it may be part of a larger Rung languages group and do not consider it to be particularly closely related to Qiangic but suggest that similarities between Gyalrongic and Qiangic may be from areal influence. However, other work suggests that Qiangic as a whole may in fact be paraphyletic, with the only commonalities of the supposed "branch" being shared archaisms and areal features that were encouraged by language contact. Jacques & Michaud (2011) propose that Qiangic including Gyalrongic may belong to a larger Burmo-Qiangic group based on some lexical innovations.
The Kiranti languages are a major family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Nepal and India by the Kirati people.
The Sal languages, also known as the Brahmaputran languages, are a branch of Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in northeast India, as well as parts of Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma), and China.
The Magar languages are a small proposed family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Nepal, notably including Magar and Kham. (Ethnologue considers each to be a cluster of languages.) They are often classified as part of the Mahakiranti family, and Van Driem (2001) proposes that they are close relatives of Mahakiranti.
The West Himalayish languages, also known as Almora and Kanauric, are a family of Sino-Tibetan languages centered in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and across the border into Nepal. LaPolla (2003) proposes that the West Himalayish languages may be part of a larger "Rung" group.
The Nung or Nungish languages are a poorly described family of uncertain affiliation within the Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Yunnan, China and Burma. They include:
The Loloish languages, also known as Yi and occasionally Ngwi or Nisoic, are a family of fifty to a hundred Sino-Tibetan languages spoken primarily in Yunnan province of China. They are most closely related to Burmese and its relatives. Both the Loloish and Burmish branches are well defined, as is their superior node, Lolo-Burmese. However, subclassification is more contentious.
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people speak Tibeto-Burman languages. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, Burmese and the Tibetic languages, which also have extensive literary traditions, dating from the 12th and 7th centuries respectively. Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail.
Laurent Sagart is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
Proto-Tibeto-Burman is the reconstructed ancestor of the Tibeto-Burman languages, that is, the Sino-Tibetan languages, except for Chinese. An initial reconstruction was produced by Paul K. Benedict and since refined by James Matisoff. Several other researchers argue that the Tibeto-Burman languages sans Chinese do not constitute a monophyletic group within Sino-Tibetan, and therefore that Proto-Tibeto-Burman was the same language as Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Gyalrong or rGyalrong, also rendered Jiarong, or sometimes Gyarung, is a subbranch of the Gyalrongic languages spoken by the Gyalrong people in Western Sichuan, China. Lai et al. (2020) refer to this group of languages as East Gyalrongic.
The Luish, Asakian, or Sak languages are a group of Sino-Tibetan languages belonging to the Sal branch. They are spoken in Burma and Bangladesh, and consist of the Sak, Kadu, and Ganan languages. In recent years, Luish languages have been influenced by Burmese and Chakma.
Jackson T.-S. Sun, also known as Jackson Tianshin Sun, is a Taiwanese linguist working on languages of the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families. He is best known for his pioneering documentation and historical-comparative work in Tani, Rgyalrongic, and Tibetic languages. Sun is a research fellow at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.
The Greater Magaric languages are a branch of Sino-Tibetan languages proposed by Nicolas Schorer (2016). Schorer considers Greater Magaric to be closely related to the Kiranti languages as part of a greater Himalayish branch, and does not consider Himalayish to be particularly closely related to the Tibetic languages, which include Tibetan and the Tamangic languages.
Southern Naga languages is a branch of Naga languages.
The West Gyalrongic languages constitute a group of Gyalrongic languages. On the basis of both morphological and lexical evidence, Lai et al. (2020) add the extinct Tangut language to West Gyalrongic.
References
- ↑ Sagart, Laurent; Jacques, Guillaume; Lai, Yunfan; Ryder, Robin J.; Thouzeau, Valentin; Greenhill, Simon J.; List, Johann-Mattis (2019-05-21). "Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116 (21): 10317–10322. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1817972116 . ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 6534992 . PMID 31061123.
- ↑ Zhang, Hanzhi; Ji, Ting; Pagel, Mark; Mace, Ruth (2020). "Dated phylogeny suggests early Neolithic origin of Sino-Tibetan languages". Scientific Reports. 10 (1): 20792. Bibcode:2020NatSR..1020792Z. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-77404-4. ISSN 2045-2322. PMC 7695722 . PMID 33247154.
- ↑ Jacques, Guillaume; Pellard, Thomas (2021-02-03). "Phylogenies based on lexical innovations refute the Rung hypothesis". Diachronica. 38 (1): 1–24. doi:10.1075/dia.19058.jac. ISSN 0176-4225.
- ↑ LaPolla, Randy. 2003. "Overview of Sino-Tibetan Morphosyntax". In Graham Thurgood & Randy LaPolla (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan Languages. London: Routledge.
- Thurgood, Graham and Randy J. LaPolla (eds.) (2003). The Sino-Tibetan Languages. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-7007-1129-5.
Sino-Tibetan branches | |||||
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| Western Himalayas (Himachal, Uttarakhand, Nepal, Sikkim) |
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| Eastern Himalayas (Tibet, Bhutan, Arunachal) | |||||
| Myanmar and Indo-Burmese border |
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| East and Southeast Asia |
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| Dubious (possible isolates) (Arunachal) |
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| Proposed groupings | |||||
| Proto-languages | |||||
Italics indicates single languages that are also considered to be separate branches. | |||||
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