Tibeto-Burman
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Tibeto-Burman is a major group of languages within the larger Sino-Tibetan language family, spoken primarily across the Himalayan region and parts of Southeast Asia. It matters because it represents the linguistic heritage of millions of people across multiple countries and helps scholars understand the historical connections and migrations of populations in Asia.
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The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Chinese members of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Over 400 Tibeto-Burmese languages 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.
Though the division of Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches (e.g. Benedict, Matisoff) is widely used, some historical linguists criticize this classification, as the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages lack any shared innovations in phonology or morphology to show that they comprise a clade of the phylogenetic tree.