| Sino-Tibetan | |
|---|---|
| Trans-Himalayan | |
| Geographic distribution | Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia |
Native speakers | (undated figure of 1.4 billion) |
| Linguistic classification | One of the world's primary language families |
| Proto-language | Proto-Sino-Tibetan |
| Subdivisions | Some 40 well-established subgroups, of which those with the most speakers are: |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 / 5 | sit |
| Linguasphere | 79- (phylozone) |
| Glottolog | sino1245 |
 Groupings of Sino-Tibetan languages | |
Sino-Tibetan (sometimes referred to as Trans-Himalayan)[1][2] is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers.[3] Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language.[4] 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). Four United Nations member states (China, Singapore, Myanmar, and Bhutan) have a Sino-Tibetan language as their main native language. 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. The Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages are generally included within Sino-Tibetan by Chinese linguists but have been excluded by the international community since the 1940s. Several links to other language families have been proposed, but none have broad acceptance.
- ^ van Driem (2014), p. 16.
- ^ List, Lai & Starostin (2019), p. 1.
- ^ Handel (2008), p. 422.
- ^ "Sino Tibetan Languages". Retrieved December 30, 2023.