Does the Sino-Tibetan Language Family Exist? — A Fresh Exploration of the Historical Relationship Between Tibetan, Chinese, and Surrounding Languages

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

The Sino-Tibetan language family is a widely known and accepted hypothesis. Especially with regards to Chinese and Tibetan, they share a common historical origin, a notion seldom disputed. However, based on his analysis of several mixed languages and his historical linguistic research, Atshogs (2003, 2004, 2005, 2013, 2022) argues that the historical tie between Tibetan and Chinese is not of a canonical genetic linguistic relationship. Rather, these two languages can be argued to be in an “anisotropic” relationship with each other and with their neighboring languages.

Specifically, Proto-Chinese may be a mixed language sharing features of Proto-Tibeto-Burman and Proto-Kra-Dai (and possibly others). Put differently, Tibetan and Chinese may share only their basic lexicon, whereas their morphological and syntactic systems may have come from different historical origins. Meanwhile, the morphological systems of Tibetan and Tibeto-Burman languages may share a common historical origin with Altaic languages. Atshogs discovered a significant number of systematic sound correspondences in morphological markers between Tibeto-Burman and Altaic languages, and termed it “Tibeto-Altaic grammatical drift”.