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.
| Sino-Tibetan | |
|---|---|
| Trans-Himalayan | |
| Geographic distribution | |
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 | |
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.
Early classifications included the Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages in the Sino-Tibetan language family. This grouping continues to be supported by Chinese linguists, but has been rejected by the international community since the 1940s, who instead attribute the similarities to sprachbund effects of areal convergence and early borrowing. Several links to other Southeast Asian language families have been proposed, but none have broad acceptance.
History
A genetic relationship between Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and other languages was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted. The initial focus on languages of civilizations with long literary traditions has been broadened to include less widely spoken languages, some of which have only recently, or never, been written. However, the reconstruction of the family is much less developed than for families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. There is no consensus regarding the date and location of their origin.
Early work
During the 18th century, several scholars noticed parallels between Tibetan and Burmese, both languages with extensive literary traditions. Early in the following century, Brian Houghton Hodgson and others noted that many non-literary languages of the highlands of northeast India and Southeast Asia were also related to these. The name "Tibeto–Burman" was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Richardson Logan, who added Karen in 1858. The third volume of the Linguistic Survey of India, edited by Sten Konow, was devoted to the Tibeto–Burman languages of British India.
Studies of the "Indo-Chinese" languages of Southeast Asia from the mid-19th century by Logan and others revealed that they comprised four families: Tibeto-Burman, Tai, Mon–Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian. Julius Klaproth had noted in 1823 that Burmese, Tibetan, and Chinese all shared common basic vocabulary but that Thai, Mon, and Vietnamese were quite different. Ernst Kuhn envisaged a group with two branches, Chinese–Siamese and Tibeto-Burman. August Conrady called this group Indo-Chinese in his influential 1896 classification, though he had doubts about Karen. Conrady's terminology was widely used, but there was uncertainty regarding his exclusion of Vietnamese. Franz Nikolaus Finck in 1909 placed Karen as a third branch of Chinese–Siamese.
Jean Przyluski introduced the French term sino-tibétain as the title of his chapter on the group in Meillet and Cohen's Les langues du monde in 1924. He divided them into three groups: Tibeto-Burman, Chinese and Tai, and was uncertain about the affinity of Karen and Hmong–Mien. The English translation "Sino-Tibetan" first appeared in a short note by Przyluski and Luce in 1931.
Shafer and Benedict
In 1935, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber started the Sino-Tibetan Philology Project, funded by the Works Project Administration and based at the University of California, Berkeley. The project was supervised by Robert Shafer until late 1938, and then by Paul K. Benedict. Under their direction, the staff of 30 non-linguists collated all the available documentation of Sino-Tibetan languages. The result was eight copies of a 15-volume typescript entitled Sino-Tibetan Linguistics. This work was never published but furnished the data for a series of papers by Shafer, as well as Shafer's five-volume Introduction to Sino-Tibetan and Benedict's Sino-Tibetan, a Conspectus.
Benedict completed the manuscript of his work in 1941, but it was not published until 1972. Instead of building the entire family tree, he set out to reconstruct a Proto-Tibeto-Burman language by comparing five major languages, with occasional comparisons with other languages. He reconstructed a two-way distinction on initial consonants based on voicing, with aspiration conditioned by pre-initial consonants that had been retained in Tibetic but lost in many other languages. Thus, Benedict reconstructed the following initials:
| TB | Tibetan | Jingpho | Burmese | Garo | Mizo | S'gaw Karen | Old Chinese |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| *k | k(h) | k(h) ~ g | k(h) | k(h) ~ g | k(h) | k(h) | *k(h) |
| *g | g | g ~ k(h) | k | g ~ k(h) | k | k(h) | *gh |
| *ŋ | ŋ | ŋ | ŋ | ŋ | ŋ | y | *ŋ |
| *t | t(h) | t(h) ~ d | t(h) | t(h) ~ d | t(h) | t(h) | *t(h) |
| *d | d | d ~ t(h) | t | d ~ t(h) | d | d | *dh |
| *n | n | n | n | n | n | n | *n ~ *ń |
| *p | p(h) | p(h) ~ b | p(h) | p(h) ~ b | p(h) | p(h) | *p(h) |
| *b | b | b ~ p(h) | p | b ~ p(h) | b | b | *bh |
| *m | m | m | m | m | m | m | *m |
| *ts | ts(h) | ts ~ dz | ts(h) | s ~ tś(h) | s | s(h) | *ts(h) |
| *dz | dz | dz ~ ts ~ ś | ts | tś(h) | f | s(h) | ? |
| *s | s | s | s | th | th | θ | *s |
| *z | z | z ~ ś | s | s | f | θ | ? |
| *r | r | r | r | r | r | γ | *l |
| *l | l | l | l | l | l | l | *l |
| *h | h | ∅ | h | ∅ | h | h | *x |
| *w | ∅ | w | w | w | w | w | *gjw |
| *y | y | y | y | tś ~ dź | z | y | *dj ~ *zj |
Although the initial consonants of cognates tend to have the same place and manner of articulation, voicing and aspiration are often unpredictable. This irregularity was attacked by Roy Andrew Miller, though Benedict's supporters attribute it to the effects of prefixes that have been lost and are often unrecoverable. The issue remains unsolved today. It was cited together with the lack of reconstructable shared morphology, and evidence that much shared lexical material has been borrowed from Chinese into Tibeto-Burman, by Christopher Beckwith, one of the few scholars still arguing that Chinese is not related to Tibeto-Burman.
Benedict also reconstructed, at least for Tibeto-Burman, prefixes such as the causative s-, the intransitive m-, and r-, b- g- and d- of uncertain function, as well as suffixes -s, -t and -n.
Study of literary languages
Old Chinese is by far the oldest recorded Sino-Tibetan language, with inscriptions dating from around 1250 BC and a huge body of literature from the first millennium BC. However, the Chinese script is logographic and does not represent sounds systematically; it is therefore difficult to reconstruct the phonology of the language from the written records. Scholars have sought to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing the obscure descriptions of the sounds of Middle Chinese in medieval dictionaries with phonetic elements in Chinese characters and the rhyming patterns of early poetry. The first complete reconstruction, the Grammata Serica Recensa of Bernard Karlgren, was used by Benedict and Shafer.
Karlgren's reconstruction was somewhat unwieldy, with many sounds having a highly non-uniform distribution. Later scholars have revised it by drawing on a range of other sources. Some proposals were based on cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages, though workers have also found solely Chinese evidence for them. For example, recent reconstructions of Old Chinese have reduced Karlgren's 15 vowels to a six-vowel system originally suggested by Nicholas Bodman. Similarly, Karlgren's *l has been recast as *r, with a different initial interpreted as *l, matching Tibeto-Burman cognates, but also supported by Chinese transcriptions of foreign names. A growing number of scholars believe that Old Chinese did not use tones and that the tones of Middle Chinese developed from final consonants. One of these, *-s, is believed to be a suffix, with cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages.
Tibetic has extensive written records from the adoption of writing by the Tibetan Empire in the mid-7th century. The earliest records of Burmese (such as the 12th-century Myazedi inscription) are more limited, but later an extensive literature developed. Both languages are recorded in alphabetic scripts ultimately derived from the Brahmi script of Ancient India. Most comparative work has used the conservative written forms of these languages, following the dictionaries of Jäschke (Tibetan) and Judson (Burmese), though both contain entries from a wide range of periods.
There are also extensive records in Tangut, the language of the Western Xia (1038–1227). Tangut is recorded in a Chinese-inspired logographic script, whose interpretation presents many difficulties, even though multilingual dictionaries have been found.
Gong Hwang-cherng has compared Old Chinese, Tibetic, Burmese, and Tangut to establish sound correspondences between those languages. He found that Tibetic and Burmese /a/ correspond to two Old Chinese vowels, *a and *ə. While this has been considered evidence for a separate Tibeto-Burman subgroup, Hill (2014) finds that Burmese has distinct correspondences for Old Chinese rhymes -ay : *-aj and -i : *-əj, and hence argues that the development *ə > *a occurred independently in Tibetan and Burmese.
Fieldwork
The descriptions of non-literary languages used by Shafer and Benedict were often produced by missionaries and colonial administrators of varying linguistic skills. Most of the smaller Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken in inaccessible mountainous areas, many of which are politically or militarily sensitive and thus closed to investigators. Until the 1980s, the best-studied areas were Nepal and northern Thailand. In the 1980s and 1990s, new surveys were published from the Himalayas and southwestern China. Of particular interest was the increasing literature on the Qiangic languages of western Sichuan and adjacent areas.
Distribution
Most of the current spread of Sino-Tibetan languages is the result of historical expansions of the three groups with the most speakers – Chinese, Burmese and Tibetic – replacing an unknown number of earlier languages. These groups also have the longest literary traditions of the family. The remaining languages are spoken in mountainous areas, along the southern slopes of the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.
Contemporary languages
The branch with the largest number of speakers by far is the Sinitic languages, with 1.3 billion speakers, most of whom live in the eastern half of China.[53] The first records of Chinese are oracle bone inscriptions from c. 1250 BC, when Old Chinese was spoken around the middle reaches of the Yellow River. Chinese has since expanded throughout China, forming a family whose diversity has been compared with the Romance languages. Diversity is greater in the rugged terrain of southeast China than in the North China Plain.
Burmese is the national language of Myanmar, and the first language of some 33 million people.[56] Burmese speakers first entered the northern Irrawaddy basin from what is now western Yunnan in the early ninth century, in conjunction with an invasion by Nanzhao that shattered the Pyu city-states. Other Burmish languages are still spoken in Dehong Prefecture in the far west of Yunnan. By the 11th century, their Pagan Kingdom had expanded over the whole basin. The oldest texts, such as the Myazedi inscription, date from the early 12th century. The closely related Loloish languages are spoken by 9 million people in the mountains of western Sichuan, Yunnan, and nearby areas in northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam.
The Tibetic languages are spoken by some 6 million people on the Tibetan Plateau and neighbouring areas in the Himalayas and western Sichuan. They are descended from Old Tibetan, which was originally spoken in the Yarlung Valley before it was spread by the expansion of the Tibetan Empire in the seventh century. Although the empire collapsed in the ninth century, Classical Tibetan remained influential as the liturgical language of Tibetan Buddhism.
The remaining languages are spoken in upland areas. Southernmost are the Karen languages, spoken by 4 million people in the hill country along the Myanmar–Thailand border, with the greatest diversity in the Karen Hills, which are believed to be the homeland of the group. The highlands stretching from northeast India to northern Myanmar contain over 100 highly diverse Sino-Tibetan languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages are found along the southern slopes of the Himalayas and the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. The 22 official languages listed in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India include only two Sino-Tibetan languages, namely Meitei (officially called Manipuri) and Bodo.
Homeland
There has been a range of proposals for the Sino-Tibetan urheimat, reflecting the uncertainty about the classification of the family and its time depth. Three major hypotheses for the place and time of Sino-Tibetan unity have been presented:
- The most commonly cited hypothesis associates the family with the Neolithic Yangshao culture (7000–5000 years BP) of the Yellow River basin, with an expansion driven by millet agriculture. This scenario is associated with a proposed primary split between Sinitic in the east and the Tibeto-Burman languages, often assigned to the Majiayao culture (5300–4000 years BP) in the upper reaches of the Yellow River on the northeast edge of the Tibetan Plateau. For example, James Matisoff proposes a split around 6000 years BP, with Chinese-speakers settling along the Yellow River and other groups migrating south down the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Brahmaputra rivers.
- George van Driem proposes a Sino-Tibetan homeland in the Sichuan Basin before 9000 years BP, with an associated taxonomy reflecting various outward migrations over time, first into northeast India, and later north (the predecessors of Chinese and Tibetic) and south (Karen and Lolo–Burmese).
- Roger Blench argues that agriculture cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Blench and Mark Post have proposed that the earliest speakers of Sino-Tibetan were not farmers but highly diverse foragers in the eastern foothills of the Himalayas in Northeast India, the area of greatest diversity, around 9000 years BP. They then envisage a series of migrations over the following millennia, with Sinitic representing one of the groups that migrated into China.
Zhang et al. (2019) performed a computational phylogenetic analysis of 109 Sino-Tibetan languages to suggest a Sino-Tibetan homeland in northern China near the Yellow River basin. The study further suggests that there was an initial major split between the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages approximately 4,200 to 7,800 years ago (with an average of 5,900 years ago), associated with the Yangshao and/or Majiayao cultures. Sagart et al. (2019) performed another phylogenetic analysis based on different data and methods to arrive at the same conclusions to the homeland and divergence model but proposed an earlier root age of approximately 7,200 years ago, associating its origin with millet farmers of the late Cishan culture and early Yangshao culture. Both of these studies have been criticized by Georg Orlandi (2021) for their reliance on lexical items, which are not seen as robust indicators of language ancestry. Another study, seeking to identify horizontal diffusion rather than phylogenetic descent, also suggested dispersal from the upper Yellow River area.
Hypothesised homeland and dispersal according to Sagart et al. (2019) Hypothesised homeland and dispersal according to van Driem (2005) Hypothesised homeland and dispersal according to Blench (2009) |
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