Sino-Tibetan languages

Sino-Tibetan
Trans-Himalayan
Geographic distribution	Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia
Linguistic classification	One of the world's primary language families
Proto-language	Proto-Sino-Tibetan
Subdivisions	Some 40 well-established subgroups, of which those with the most speakers are: Sinitic (Chinese) Lolo-Burmese Tibetic Karenic Bodo–Garo Kuki-Chin Meitei Tamangic Bai Jingpho–Luish
ISO 639-2 / 5	sit
Linguasphere	79- (phylozone)
Glottolog	sino1245
Groupings of Sino-Tibetan languages

Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources,^[1][2] is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers.^[3] Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language.^[4] The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (6 million). Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.

Several low-level subgroups have been securely reconstructed, but reconstruction of a proto-language for the family as a whole is still at an early stage, so the higher-level structure of Sino-Tibetan remains unclear. Although the family is traditionally presented as divided into Sinitic (i.e. Chinese languages) and Tibeto-Burman branches, a common origin of the non-Sinitic languages has never been demonstrated. The Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages are generally included within Sino-Tibetan by Chinese linguists, but have been excluded by the international community since the 1940s. Several links to other language families have been proposed, but none have broad acceptance.