Tibeto-Burmese Branch of the Sino-Tibetan Language Family

Introduction

Tibeto-Burmese (or Tibeto-Burman) branch is a key component of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It Nepal Map consists of a large Burma number of highly differentiated 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. It is thought that the Tibeto-Burmese peoples migrated from the Himalayas along the river valleys. They reached peninsular Southeast Asia by the first millennium AD. By the time of their arrival, this area was already settled by speakers of Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian languages.

Bodo Woman The existence of the Tibeto-Burmese language group was proposed in the 1850's when it was noticed that words in written Tibetan were similar to their counterparts in written Burmese. Subsequently, British scholars and colonial administrators in India and Burma began to study some of the languages of the region that seemed to be related to written Tibetan and written Burmese. As a result of their efforts and those by scholars who succeeded them, the existence of the Tibeto-Burmese Tibet Map language branch became firmly established.

The Tibeto-Burman branch remains a relatively underexplored field, and Burma Map there is no reliable classification for the genetic relationships among its various sub-branches. It is not possible to say exactly how many Tibeto-Burmese languages there are, how many of them are separate languages or dialects of one language, or even if there are still undiscovered languages. Many Tibeto-Burmese languages have been poorly recorded until recently, and many are still hardly known at all, all of which makes it difficult to classify them. Ethnologue lists 389 separate Tibeto-Burmese languages, but Matisoff estimates that the number of separate languages may actually be closer to 250 with the other languages being variants of the same language.

Although the total number of Tibeto-Burmese speakers is only about 60 million, the number of individual languages is by far the largest of any language family in Asia. Its most populous languages are Burmese with over 32 million speakers, followed by Tibetan spoken by some 6 million speakers. The table below shows the distribution of Tibeto-Burman languages in terms of number of speakers (STEDT).

Number of speakers	Number of languages
under 1,000	131
less than 10,000	123
10,000-24,000	44
25,000-49,000	27
50,000-99,000	16
100,000-249,000	16
250,000-499,000	11
500,000-999,000	12
over 1,000,000	9

With 131 languages that have under 1,000 speakers, it is clear that a good percentage of Tibeto-Burmese languages today are the brink of extinction.

The following Tibeto-Burmese languages have official status in their respective countries.

Burmese	Myanmar
Tibetan	Tibetan Autonomous Region and Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures in People's Republic of China along with Mandarin.
Dzongka	Bhutan
Tamang	One of tne official languages of Nepal.

Dialects

Tibeto-Burmese languages present a complex dialect picture. Most have a number of distinct dialects, some of which are mutually comprehensible, as is the case in Burmese, and some which are not, as in Tibetan which has several distinct spoken varieties that are in many instances not mutually comprehensible but that have over the centuries maintained a common literary tradition.

Structure

Sound System

Jingpho Women

The sound systems of Tibeto-Burman languages, despite their great differentiation, share some important features:

They have a more complex sylllabic structure than Chinese, allowing consonant clusters..
Most Tibeto-Burmese languages are tonal. The number of tones differs from language to language. For instance, Burmese has three tones.

Grammar

Members o fthe Tibeto-Burmese branch tend to show some degree of agglutination. In an agglutinative language, affixes, each one with its own meaning, are added one after another to an unchanged root to express grammatical relations.

Postpositions are used to mark grammatical relationships.
Classifiers are used when counting or quantifying nouns.
The normal word order is Subject-Object-Verb.
Politeness is grammatically marked.

Vocabulary

Tibeto-Burmese languages share a common stock of vocabulary. However, individual languages reflect different influences, depending on the country in which they are spoken and their history. For instance, Burmese has been influenced by Pali, English, and Mon, and to a lesser extent, by Chinese. Dungan has many Russian loanwords. Bodo has borrowed words from Assamese. Garo has many Bengali loanwords. Tibetan has taken many words taken from Sanskrit and Chinese.

Writing

Tibetan Writing

Tibeto-Burmese languages are written with a variety of scripts. Below are some examples.

Burmese	Myanmar script
Tibetan	Tibetan script
Lepcha	Lepcha script
Bodo	Devanagari script

Resources

Click here to find out where various Tibeto-Burmese languages are taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying various Tibeto-Burmese languages.

Online resources for the study of Tibeto-Burmese languages
Ethnologue report on Tibeto-Burmese
Wikipedia article on Tibeto-Burman
List of Tibeto-Burman languages

How difficult is it to learn Tibeto-Burmese languages?
Burmese is considered to be a Category II language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English. There is no information on the difficulty level of the other Tibeto-Burmese languages.

Click on the name of the language to learn more about it on this website
Burmese
Tibetan

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