Tibeto-Burman Languages

This page is still under construction. Last modified 2/1/1998
Suggestions welcome: e-mail Scott DeLancey at delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu 

Tibeto-Burman is one of two major branches of the Sino-Tibetan
family, the other being the Sinitic (Chinese) languages.  The
Chinese and TB branches of ST are strikingly different in their
morphological and syntactic typology.  The TB branch consists of
2-300 languages spoken primarily in the uplands of Inner, South,
and Southeast Asia.  TB languages are found from Sichuan and
Qinghai in the north to the southern extremity of Myanmar, and
from northwestern Vietnam in the east to northern Pakistan in the
west.
     The subclassification of TB remains uncertain in many
important respects; here is one plausible classification (for a
different classification scheme with somewhat more lower-level
detail click here):

Bodic:
     East Himalayan
          
	  Kiranti:  Limbu, Hayu, Sunwar, etc.
          Chepang
          Kham
          Newari
     Tibeto-Kanauri
          Tibetan-Tamang
               Tibetan
               Monpa
               Gurung-Tamang-Thakali    
          West Himalayan:  Kinnauri, Pattani, etc.
Baric
     Bodo-Garo-Konyak
          Bodo-Garo:  Bodo, Garo, etc.
     Kuki-Chin-Naga
          Kuki-Chin:  Mizo (=Lushei), Tiddim, Lakher, etc.
          Mikir-Meithei
          Naga:  Angami, Sema, Rengma, etc.
     Kachinic
          Jinghpaw
          Nungish:  Rawang, Dulung, etc.
          Konyak:  Nocte, Chang, etc.
     (Abor-Miri-Dafla):  Nisi (Dafla), Adi, Mishmi (?), etc.

Burmic
     Lolo-Burmese (or Burmese-Yipho)
          Burmish:  Burmese, etc.
          Loloish:  Yi (Lolo), Lahu, Lisu, Akha/Hani, etc.
     Qiangic:  Gyarong, Tangut, Qiang, Muya, Prami, etc.

Karen
     
     While TB is quite diversified in terms of the number of
distinguishable languages, it is relatively cohesive in other
respects.  Most TB languages are identifiable as such on the
basis of easily recognizable shared vocabulary, and while
interesting divergences in grammatical structure are found, they
are not for the most part of the gross nature found in families
such as Indo-European or Afroasiatic.  All except the Karen
languages show typical SOV typology.
     Straightforward geographical considerations would suggest as
a center of dispersal for the Tibeto-Burman languages somewhere
in eastern Tibet.  Here the headwaters of the Jiangzi (Yangtze)
and the great bend of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra are scarcely two
hundred kilometers apart, with the Mekhong and the Salween in
between them, and the Irrawady and Chindwin systems rising not
far to the south.  Standard principles of linguistic geography
point to the same conclusion, for it is in the area of
southeastern Tibet, northern Burma, western Yunnan, and the
frontiers of Arunachal Pradesh that we find the greatest
linguistic diversity.  In an area describable as a right triangle
250 miles on a side, we find all the major branches of the family
except Karen, and a large number of the subbranches--both Burmish
and Yipho, Qiangic, Kachinic, four of the five subbranches of
Baric, and two of the four subbranches of Bodic.  The rest of the
Tibeto-Burman-speaking area is linguistically segregated, with
Bodic languages spread westward along the Himalayas, Burmese-
Yipho speakers south and east along the Mekhong and Irrawady
systems, and Baric groups clustering along the southern edge of
the core area, and spreading down the Brahmaputra (Bodo-Garo) and
Chindwin (Kuki-Chin).
     As the languages dispersed from this center, they entered
into the geographical domains of other language families, whose
local ways they have to some extent adopted.  We find, for
example, strong traces of Mon-Khmer influence in Karen, and less
deeply-established but still detectably in Burmese.  Languages on
the eastern frontier of TB territory--all of Lolo-Burmese, but
especially the Loloish languages, as well as Qiangic--show many
features of the Chinese-Southeast Asian areal complex, including
monosyllabicity, considerable simplification of syllable
structures, well-developed tone systems, classifier systems, and
postpositions derived from serial verb constructions.  Matisoff
has referred to these as the "Sinospheric" languages.  Both the
Bodic languages, as they spread along the Himalayas, and the
Baric languages spreading into Assam came into contact with Indic
languages.  Linguistic evidence suggests that the Bodic contact
with Indic has been longer and more intense, as various Bodic
languages show numerous typical South Asian features, such as
inflectional structure (with Newari, perhaps the most Indicized
of the Tibeto-Burman languages, even developing noun inflection),
lack of tone, "light verb" constructions, participial verb forms
in non-final clauses, and postpositions derived from older
possessed nouns.  Symmetrically to the "Sinospheric" languages we
can refer to these as "Indospheric".
     Both of these terms are probably too gross.  On the eastern
frontier of the TB area, it is probably necessary to distinguish
participation in the Southeast Asian Sprachbund--which is
characteristic of all BY languages--from the specifically Chinese
influence detectable in certain Yipho and Nungish languages.  In
the west, we find South Asian areal features in both the
languages spoken along the Himalayan chain and in those spoken in
Assam and along the Indo-Burmese frontier, but each of these
areas shows its own local peculiarities; the term "Indospheric"
thus in fact refers to two historically and geographically
distinct sets of areal phenomena.

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Papers available at this site

DeLancey (1986) Relativization as nominalization in Tibetan and Newari
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Scott DeLancey, delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu