The Sino-Tibetan language family is one of the largest in the world. It is second only to the Indo-European language family in terms of the number of speakers. The family consists of 403 highly differentiated languages with a vast geographical spread, great linguistic complexity, and a long historical record.

As the name itself implies, this family consists of two main branches:

• The Sino- part of the name refers to the various Chinese languages sometimes referred to as dialects. The Chinese (or Sinitic) branch has over 1.3 billion speakers, the largest number of speakers of any language branch in the world.
• The Tibeto-Burman part of the name refers to 389 languages spoken from the Tibetan plateau in the north to the Malay peninsula in the south, and from northern Pakistan in the west ti northeastern Vietnam in the east.

The ancestral *Proto-Sino-Tibetan language is thought to have originated somewhere in the Himalayan plateau, the source of the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia, including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, and Irrawaddy. Scholars hypothesize that this ancestral language split into *Proto-Chinese and *Proto-Tibeto-Burman around 4,000 BC.

While the Chinese branch is fairly well established, the Tibeto-Burman branch remains a relatively underexplored field, and there is no reliable classification for the genetic relationships among its various sub-branches. It is not possible to say exactly how many Tibeto-Burman languages there are, how many of them are separate languages or dialects of one language, or even if there are still languages that have yet to be discovered.

In the table below, based on Ethnologue, the figures in parentheses show the number of languages in the group. The languages in the Chinese branch have a large number of speakers, while languages in the Tibeto-Burman branch include many with a small number of speakers. Many of them are endangered, and some are nearly or possibly already extinct. There are several dozen languages that are yet to be classified. Most have been poorly described.

Click here to view the Sino-Tibetan family tree.

The following Sino-Tibetan languages enjoy official status.

Over one hundred Tibeto-Burmese languages, all spoken by fewer than 1,000 people, are endangered or on the brink of extinction. Several are already extinct.

Sino-Tibetan languages have a complex dialect picture. For instance, the identification of the varieties of Chinese as languages or dialects is a controversial issue. Some call Chinese a language and its subdivisions dialects, while others call Chinese a language branch and its subdivisions languages.

Tibetan has several distinct spoken varieties that are in many instances not mutually comprehensible but that have over the centuries maintained a common literary tradition, much like Chinese. Moreover, the boundaries between Tibetan and certain other Himalayan languages are sometimes unclear. In general, the dialects of central Tibet and nearby areas are considered Tibetan dialects, while other varieties such as Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Sherpa, and Ladakhi, are considered closely-related but separate languages. In practice, however, as with all languages, making a clear distinction between languages versus dialects is extremely difficult.

Writing
Sino-Tibetan languages are written with a variety of scripts. Below are some examples.

Chinese	Characters
Burmese	Myanmar script
Tibetan	Tibetan script
Lepcha	Lepcha script
Bodo	Devanagari script	x

Click here to find out where Sino-Tibetan languages are taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Sino-Tibetan languages.

Online resources for the study of Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan dictionaries
The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus