Sino-Tibetan Languages

The Sino-Tibetan languages, stretching from Central Asia through continental Southeast Asia to East Asia, are a huge language group, like a fertile linguistic forest. How did the geographical diversity and continuity of the Sino-Tibetan languages come about?

The Sino-Tibetan languages all have complex histories and situations, with language divergence and fusion based on ethnic interaction, in addition to autonomous changes within each language plus influences from the dominant language. In order to elucidate the direction of the succession of cognates and parallel innovations among languages, and to reconstruct the history of languages without written records, it is necessary to conduct a more extensive and precise analysis of the typological structures.

It has been clear that Sino-Tibetan languages underwent a different process of development and change from Indo-European languages. Sino-Tibetan languages are constructed on monosyllabic morphemes, and their words lack morphological variation. Indo-European languages, in contrast, the basic grammatical structure is manifested in word morphology. So there are limits to the mechanical application of the rules and methodology derived from historical studies of Indo-European languages. We have been seeking different approaches and methodologies.

This project will explore the geographical diversity and continuity of Sino-Tibetan languages and the commonalities in the depths of their typological structures, and elucidate the aspects of historical change reflected in the gradual transition of the typological structures of various languages in Asia.