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- The Sino-Tibetan family comprises about 500 languages spoken across a wide geographic range, from the west coast of the Pacific to Nepal, India, and Pakistan. Speakers of these languages have played a major role in human prehistory, giving rise to early high cultures China, Tibet, Burma and Nepal.
phys.org › news › 2019-05-sino-tibetan-language-family-revealedOrigin of Sino-Tibetan language family revealed by new research
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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).
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Sino-Tibetan languages, group of languages that includes both the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages. In terms of numbers of speakers, they constitute the world’s second largest language family (after Indo-European), including more than 300 languages and major dialects. In a wider sense, Sino-Tibetan has been defined as also including the Tai (Daic) and Karen language families. Some scholars also include the Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages and even the Ket language of central Siberia, but the affiliation of these languages to the Sino-Tibetan group has not been conclusively demonstrated. Other linguists connect the Mon-Khmer family of the Austroasiatic stock or the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) family, or both, with Sino-Tibetan; a suggested term for this most inclusive group, which seems to be based on premature speculations, is Sino-Austric. Yet other scholars see a relationship of Sino-Tibetan with the Athabaskan and other languages of North America, but proof of this is beyond reach at the present state of knowledge.
Sino-Tibetan languages were known for a long time by the name of Indochinese, which is now restricted to the languages of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They were also called Tibeto-Chinese until the now universally accepted designation Sino-Tibetan was adopted. The term Sinitic also has been used in the same sense, but also as below for the Chinese subfamily exclusively. (In the following discussion of language groups, the ending -ic, as in Sinitic, indicates a relatively large group of languages, and -ish denotes a smaller grouping.)
The old literary languages, Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese, are generally considered as representatives of three major divisions within Sino-Tibetan (Sinitic, Tibetic, and Burmic, respectively). A fourth literary language, Thai, or Siamese (written from the 13th century), represents what was accepted for a long time as a Tai division of Sino-Tibetan or as a division of a Sino-Tai family. This relationship is now more commonly considered nongenetic in that most of the shared vocabulary is more likely attributable to a history of cultural borrowing than to derivation from a common ancestral language.
Sinitic stands apart from Tibetic and Burmic on many grounds, including vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and phonology. Most scholars agree on combining Tibetic and Burmic into a Tibeto-Burman subfamily, which also includes Bodo-Garo or Baric but not Karenic. If Karenic is to be considered Sino-Tibetan, it must be set up as an independent member of a Tibeto-Karen group that includes Tibeto-Burman. The special affinities between Sinitic and Karenic (especially in syntax) are then considered secondary. The two closely related language groups, Hmong and Mien (also known as Miao and Yao), are thought by some to be very remotely related to Sino-Tibetan; they are spoken in western China and northern mainland Southeast Asia and may well be of Austro-Tai stock.
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In attempting to determine the exact interrelationship of the Tai languages, Karenic, Sino-Tibetan, and several marginal tongues, scholars must keep in mind that a discernible layer of Sino-Tibetan features in a given language may have been superimposed upon an older, non-Sino-Tibetan foundation (called the substratum language). Attributing a language to Sino-Tibetan or to another family may depend entirely on the ability of scholars to identify the substratum. Thus, if Tai is not considered as a division of Sino-Tibetan, it is because the substratum has been recognized as Austronesian; if Karen is still included among Sino-Tibetan languages on some level, it is perhaps because identification of a substratum is still lacking. Among the languages that have been classified as Sino-Tibetan, a great many are known only from word lists or have not yet been described in a way that makes valid comparisons possible.
A number of Sino-Tibetan languages are enumerated below together with their most likely affiliation. Some scholars believe the Tibetic and Burmic divisions to be premature and that for the present their subdivisions (such as Bodish, Himalayish, Kirantish, Burmish, Kachinish, and Kukish) should be considered as the classificatory peaks around which other Sino-Tibetan languages group themselves as members or more or less distant relatives. Certainly the stage has not yet been reached in which definite boundaries can be laid down and ancestral Proto-, or Common, Tibetic and Proto-, or Common, Burmic can be undisputedly reconstructed.
Jun 10, 2020 · How Many People Speak Sino-Tibetan Languages? When it comes to speaker numbers, the Sino-Tibetan language family is 2nd only to the Indo-European family. By a huge margin, the most widely spoken Sino-Tibetan language is the Sinitic language Mandarin. Mandarin has approximately 920 million native speakers.
Sino-Tibetan (ST) is one of the largest language families in the world, with more first-language speakers than even Indo-European. The more than 1.1 billion speakers of Sinitic (the Chinese dialects) constitute the world's largest speech community. ST includes both the Sinitic and the Tibeto-Burman languages.
Sino-Tibetan languages, Superfamily of languages whose two branches are the Sinitic, or Chinese, languages and the Tibeto-Burman family, an assemblage of several hundred very diverse languages spoken by some 65 million people from northern Pakistan east to Vietnam and from the Tibetan Plateau south to the Malay Peninsula.
Apr 24, 2019 · 24 April 2019. The origin and spread of the Sino-Tibetan language family. A robust computational approach with added finesse provides evidence to support the view that the Sino-Tibetan...
Most Sino-Tibetan languages possess phonemic tones, which indicate a difference in meaning in otherwise similar words. There are no tones in Purik, a Western Tibetan language; Ambo, a Northern Tibetan tongue; and Newari of Nepal. Balti, another Western Tibetan language, has pitch differences in polysyllabic nouns.
