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Origin

The Chinese language is believed to come from the Sino-Tibetian family of languages.  The Sino-Tibetan family has many groups of languages. However, the membership and classification of the Sino-Tibetian family of languages is debated.  The "Sinitic" part of the name refers to the various Chinese languages and the "Tibetan" part refers to several languages found mainly in Tibet, Burma, and nearby territories.

The Sinitic languages are spoken by over 1,000 million people. The vast majority of these are in China (over 980 million) and Taiwan (19 million).  Imporiant Chinese-speaking communities are also found in many other parts of the world, especially in the USA.  After Chinese, Burmese and Tibetan are the two main languages of this family. Burmese is spoken by over 25 million people in Burma as a mother tongue, and several million more use it as a second language throughout the region.

It is possible to identify clusters of languages which have certain features in common.  But groupings of this kind display many differences as well as similarities and it has not yet proved possible to find a neat way of classifying these, and the other groups thought to belong to the same family, into two or three types.

The best known of the Sino-Tibetian family of languages is the group called Chinese.  Tibetan and Burmese also belong to the Sino-Tibetan family. Sometimes they are considered one group, sometimes two. Another group includes Thai and Lao. Thai is spoken in Thailand mostly, Lao mostly in Laos. The Miao-Yao languages are sometimes considered Sino-Tibetan. They are spoken by tribespeople in southwest China, northern Myanmar, and Indochina.

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