ABSTRACT
Just as English is a late-born descendant in the large family of Indo-European languages (French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old Persian, etc.), modern Chinese comes from a family of languages called Sinitic or Sino-Tibetan. Geographically, Sino-Tibetan group languages cover China, Vietnam, Tibet, Thailand, Laos, and most of Burma. 163 Since 1949, the standard Chinese dialect has been Mandarin (putong-hua, “ordinary people’s language”), the dialect around the northern capital of Beijing. It should be noted that some (spoken) Chinese dialects are as mutually incomprehensible as Swedish is to German or as Spanish is to Italian; some are as different as English is to Finnish. 164
