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The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descending from Old Tibetan (7th to 9th centuries, [2] or to the 11th/12th centuries). According to Nicolas Tournadre, there are 50 Tibetic languages, which branch into more than 200 dialects, which could be grouped into eight dialect continua. [2]
The ethnic roots of Tibetans can be traced back to a deep Eastern Asian lineage representing the indigenous population of the Tibetan plateau since c. 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, and arriving Neolithic farmers from the Yellow River within the last 10,000 years, and which can be associated with having introduced the Sino-Tibetan languages.
Sino-Tibetan (sometimes referred to as Trans-Himalayan) [1] [2] is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. [3] Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. [4]
This is a list of European languages by the number of native speakers in Europe only. List. Rank Name Native speakers Total speakers 1 Russian: 106,000,000 [1]
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
Though the division of Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches (e.g. Benedict, Matisoff) is widely used, some historical linguists criticize this classification, as the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages lack any shared innovations in phonology or morphology [2] to show that they comprise a clade of the phylogenetic tree.
[1] [2] Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. The three largest phyla of the Indo-European language family in Europe are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic; they have more than 200 million speakers each, and together account for close to 90% of Europeans.
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [ 1 ] Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.