Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan - PubMed (original) (raw)

Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan

Laurent Sagart et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019.

Abstract

The Sino-Tibetan language family is one of the world's largest and most prominent families, spoken by nearly 1.4 billion people. Despite the importance of the Sino-Tibetan languages, their prehistory remains controversial, with ongoing debate about when and where they originated. To shed light on this debate we develop a database of comparative linguistic data, and apply the linguistic comparative method to identify sound correspondences and establish cognates. We then use phylogenetic methods to infer the relationships among these languages and estimate the age of their origin and homeland. Our findings point to Sino-Tibetan originating with north Chinese millet farmers around 7200 B.P. and suggest a link to the late Cishan and the early Yangshao cultures.

Keywords: East Asia; Sino-Tibetan languages; computer-assisted language comparison; human prehistory; peopling.

Copyright © 2019 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.

Languages in our sample, contrasted with ancient sites reflecting early stages of domestication and the estimated spread of non-Sinitic languages (see Homeland, Archaeology, and Agriculture). Ancient language locations reflect supposed political and cultural epicenters of the varieties.

Fig. 2.

The Maximum Clade Credibility tree from the best-fitting model (relaxed clock with covarion). Branches with less than 0.8 posterior probability are dashed; other branches have posterior probabilities >0.8. For densitrees of the data, see

SI Appendix, section 4

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