Sinitic languages

Uncommon card · No. 77275

The Sinitic languages (simplified Chinese: 汉语族; traditional Chinese: 漢語族; pinyin: Hànyǔ zú), also known as Chinese languages, are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is a primary split between the Sinitic languages and the rest of the family (the Tibeto-Burman languages). This view is rejected by some researchers but has found phylogenetic support among others. The Macro-Bai languages, whose classification is difficult, may be an offshoot of Old Chinese and thus also Sinitic; otherwise, Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a shared linguistic evolution and writing system (i.e. Written Chinese), and use of the term "Sinitic" may reflect the linguistic view that the Chinese language constitutes a family of distinct languages, rather than variants of a single language.

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