ABSTRACT
The Sino-Tibetan family consists of two branches: Sinitic, consisting of the Chinese languages and possibly the aberrant Bai or Minjia language of Yunnan (although Bai may also be a heavily Sinicised Tibeto-Burman language), and Tibeto-Burman, which includes several hundred languages spoken from the Tibetan plateau in the north to the Malay peninsula in the south and from northern Pakistan in the west to northeastern Vietnam in the east. Earlier classification schemes included Miao-Yao, Tai and Vietnamese in the Sino-Tibetan family on the basis of their remarkable typological resemblance to Chinese, but it is now clear that the structural resemblances and shared vocabulary among these languages are areal features rather than shared inheritance from a common ancestor. Comparative Tibeto-Burman is a relatively unexplored field and there is not yet a
complete and reliable schema for the genetic relationships among the various subbranches of the family. (Indeed, we cannot say for certain how many Tibeto-Burman languages there are or even whether there may not still be a few – possibly in western Nepal, very probably in northern Burma and southeastern Tibet – that are yet to be discovered.) With the exception of the problematic Rung group, there is general agreement that the groupings listed below constitute genetic units at some level. (Note that many languages are known in the literature by several names, usually including one or more Chinese, Burmese or Indic ethnonyms which sometimes label groups speaking rather diverse languages. A very useful list of language names is given in Hale (1982).)
Bodish: includes Tibetan; Kanauri, Bunan and other poorly documented languages of the Himalayan frontier of India; Gurung, Tamang, Thakali; probably Newari, the old state language of Nepal; and some (but not all) other Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal.
