Sino-Tibetan Languages

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Sino-Tibetan languages Summary

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Sino-Tibetan Languages

Sino-Tibetan is the largest language family in the world, in terms of the number of people who speak one of its components as their first language. It includes Chinese and its variants; Tibetan; and most of the indigenous languages of the Himalayan region, as well as some of the more important languages of Southeast Asia.

The family is commonly divided into two groups. Whereas the sole constituents of Sinitic are the variants of Chinese (which are mostly, but quite misleadingly, referred to as the "dialects" of Chinese), the Tibeto-Burman branch numbers several hundred often poorly known languages and language groups, the proper linguistic classification of which is still largely a task for future research.

The Bodic languages (bod, Tibetan for "Tibet") are further subdivided into Bodish and East Himalayan. The former include Tibetan proper and its variants; Kanauri in northern India; and Newari and the Tamangic languages in Nepal (Tamang, Gurung, and Thakali). East Himalayan is formed by, among others, the Kiranti (or Rai) languages, the Kham-Magar group, and Bahing (Vayu), all spoken in central and eastern Nepal. Baric is a conventional term used for the Kamarupan languages (named after the medieval state of Kamarupa in northeastern India), made up of a large number of lesser language groups, which are further subdivided into the Abor-Miri-Dafla, the Mikir-Meithei, and the Kuki-Chin-Naga groups.

To Burmic belongs the Lolo-Burmese group, the most important language of which is literary Burmese, the state language of Myanmar (Burma); Burmic also contains sizable groups of languages in Thailand, such as Lahu and Lisu.

Karenic, sometimes viewed as a higher-level subgroup of Sino-Tibetan, taxonomically coordinates with Tibeto-Burman, rather than being one of its branches, and consists of the Karen languages Pwo and Sgaw, spoken in Myanmar and Thailand.

Kachinic (e.g., Jinghpo, or Kachin proper, in northern Myanmar) is sometimes classified as a subbranch of Baric, but some researchers group it with Burmic or treat it as a separate Tibeto-Burman branch.

Qiangic, a small family in South China, has been added to Tibeto-Burman recently; it is sometimes viewed as a separate branch of the family, sometimes included in Burmic. Some linguists set up a distinct Rung branch, composed of Qiangic, the Nung languages of northern Myanmar, and Gyarong and Primi/Pumi of Southwest China. The extinct language of the Tangut (the language of the Xi Xia empire, which flourished in Gansu and Shaanxi Provinces between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries), written in a highly unique and complicated script, is mostly viewed as Tibeto-Burman. Its place in the family is still debated, but most researchers opt for its inclusion in either the Rung subgroup or Lolo-Burmese.

The Bai (or Minjia) language of northern Yunnan Province, China, may constitute another, separate Tibeto-Burman group. This, as well as any other, classification of Sino-Tibetan or Tibeto-Burman, can only be viewed as preliminary, and numerous details, as well as some rather drastic revisions, of it are still the subject of current debates.

Another division of the Tibeto-Burman language— into indospheric and sinospheric languages—is based on cultural rather than linguistic criteria. Indospheric languages (the most typical of which are the Bodic and Baric languages) are spoken in the cultural realm of greater India, whereas the sinosphere is dominated by Chinese culture. The millennia-long influences of these dominating cultural areas are reflected in numerous loanwords (from Chinese and Indo-Aryan languages, respectively) found in the languages, as well as in some real linguistic traits. Thus, indospheric languages generally display more complicated morphological systems than languages of the sinosphere (with the Kiranti languages in eastern Nepal being morphologically the most elaborate of the Sino-Tibetan languages), whereas the latter, generally poorer in morphological devices, tend to monosyllabicity of lexemes and display intricate tone systems. However, this division is far from being unequivocal, and it does not imply that direct influence of the eponymous languages is solely responsible for these differences.

Written Sources

Some Sino-Tibetan languages are among those languages of the world with the longest continuous written attestation. First mention is due to Chinese, which has been written in its unique script at least since the fourteenth century BCE.

Tibetan writing begins in the seventh century CE; the script is an offshoot of the Indian family of scripts and continues to be used today. Newari, the language of the original inhabitants of the Kathmandu valley, was written in Devanagari script beginning in the seventeenth century (with at least one manuscript dated as early as the fourteenth century). Lepcha, the state language of Sikkim, had a script of its own, which has been in use from the eighteenth century onward but is little used today. Burmese has been written since the twelfth century in a script that is likewise a development of an Indic predecessor.

A completely different kind of script, which has been called possibly the most complicated writing system humanity has ever used, is the Tangut script, which rendered the language of the Xi Xia empire. Although considerable progress was made in Tangut philology and linguistics during the last decades of the twentieth century, it cannot be regarded as fully deciphered.

The Naxi (or Moso) language of Yunnan Province, China, is well known for a particularly interesting kind of writing system, which mainly consists of iconic, but nevertheless conventionalized, pictographs.

Genetic Relationship

Though the genetic relationship of the Sino-Tibetan languages is no longer in doubt, the details of this relationship are still very far from having been worked out. One of the reasons for this is, quite understandably, the great number of languages in the Tibeto-Burman branch, only a small number of which have been adequately described so far. Moreover, a depressing number of these languages is at present heavily endangered, which renders the collection of reliable data for them the most urgent task of contemporary Sino-Tibetan linguistics. On the Sinitic side, the last decades of the twentieth century saw a great deal of progress in our understanding of the phonological prehistory of Chinese, though too many details are still the subject of controversies to be able to speak of a general consensus on the sound-shape of early Chinese.

Besides subclassification, the most hotly debated topics of Sino-Tibetan linguistics includes such questions as whether the highly complicated verbal concord system of, for example, the Kiranti languages is to be taken as original for Tibeto-Burman or the more isolating typology (the fact that words show only a minimal amount of morphological elements) of the Southeast Asian members of the family—and if a more isolating and tonal parent-language has to be reconstructed, how many distinctive tones should be reconstructed for the parent language, and so on.

Characteristics of Sino-Tibetan Languages

The Sino-Tibetan family shows perhaps more internal typological diversity than any other established group of related languages. Most languages show systematic tonal contrasts, some do not; the basic word order found in most Tibeto-Burman languages is subject-object-verb, but Karenic and Sinitic languages show subject-verb-object syntax (and prepositions as opposed to the postpositions common in the rest of the family). The morphological techniques employed range from mostly isolating (in Southeast Asia and Sinitic), over several degrees of agglutinativity, to high levels of polysynthesis (in Kiranti).