Sino-Tibetan
Also known as Trans-Himalayan languages, Trans-Himalayan, Sino–Tibetan languages
language family native to Asia
AI overview
Sino-Tibetan is a major language family native to Asia that includes Mandarin Chinese and many other languages spoken across China, Tibet, and surrounding regions. It matters because it represents one of the world's largest language families by number of speakers, making it central to understanding the linguistic diversity and history of East and Central Asia.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Article
Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) 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 (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (6 million). 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.