Tibeto-Burman Languages

Tibeto-Burman languages, language group within the Sino-Tibetan family. In the early 21st century, Tibeto-Burman languages were spoken by approximately 57 million people; countries that had more than 1 million Tibeto-Burman speakers included Myanmar (Burma; about 29 million), China (some 17.2 million), India (about 5.5 million), Nepal (some 2.5 million), and Bhutan (about 1.2 million). Other countries with substantial numbers of Tibeto-Burman speakers included Thailand (535,000), Bangladesh (530,000), Pakistan (360,000), Laos (42,000), and Vietnam (40,000).

The great Sino-Tibetan (ST) language family, comprising Chinese on the one hand and Tibeto-Burman (TB) on the other, is comparable in time-depth and internal diversity to the Indo-European language family and is equally important in the context of world civilization. The cultural and numerical predominance of Chinese (nearly 2 billion speakers) is counterbalanced by the sheer number of languages (some 250–300) in the Tibeto-Burman branch. Many scholars, especially in China, interpret “Sino-Tibetan” to include the Tai and Hmong-Mien families as well, although a consensus is developing that these two families, while possibly related to each other, have only an ancient contact relationship with Chinese.