ABSTRACT
The Sino-Tibetan family Speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages range from northeastern India to Vietnam and include many groups that straddle national borders. Most are minorities, except those of the Sinitic subclass, which includes more than a billion people in the People's Republic of China and ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. The Tibeto-Burman subclass includes twenty groups, all minorities except the Burmese. Most live primarily in China, which classifies them as National Minorities. Most such groups living in Southeast Asia migrated there from China. Among them are such groups as the Nagas, who straddle the border of Burma into India and Bangladesh. There are two other major subclasses, the Karen and the so-called Miao-Yao (so-called because both terms were given by outsiders and are pejorative); the people themselves prefer the terms Hmong and Mian, respectively. The Hmong are most widely distributed-in China, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and, as a result of the Vietnam War, in Switzerland, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere.
