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The origin and spread of the Sino-Tibetan language family

A robust computational approach with added finesse provides evidence to support the view that the Sino-Tibetan languages arose in northern China and began to split into branches about 5,900 years ago.
  1. Randy J. LaPolla

    1. Randy J. LaPolla is in the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639818, Singapore.

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The location and timing of the emergence of the Sino-Tibetan language family has long been debated. This family has around 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, the second largest number of speakers globally after those who speak languages in the Indo-European family. One school of thought is that the ancestral language (Proto-Sino-Tibetan) from which all the Sino-Tibetan languages evolved originated in northern China around 4,000–6,000 years ago1,2. An alternative view is that it arose 9,000 years ago in southwest China or northeast India3,4.

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Nature 569, 45-47 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01214-6

References

  1. LaPolla, R. J. in Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics (eds Aikhenvald, A. Y. & Dixon, R. M. W.) 225–254 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

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  2. Bradley, D. 10th Int. Conf. Evol. Linguistics Nanjing Univ. (2018).

  3. van Driem, G. in Trans-Himalayan Linguistics (eds Owen-Smith, T. & Hill, N. W.) 11–40 (de Gruyter, 2014).

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  4. LaPolla, R. J. Linguist. Tibeto-Burman Area 39, 282–297 (2016).

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  5. Zhang, M., Yan, S., Pan, W. & Jin, L. Nature 569, 112–115 (2019).

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  6. Buck, C. D. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages 152 (Univ. Chicago Press, 1949).

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  7. Li, L. & Chen, X. The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).

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