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The Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family composed of, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto...

The Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family composed of, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers. Sino-Tibetan language family has been defined as also including the Tai and Karen languages. Some linguistic scholars also include the Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) languages and the Ket language of central Siberia. A few scholars, most prominently Christopher Beckwith and Roy Andrew Miller, argue that Chinese is not related to Tibeto-Burman. They point to an absence of regular sound correspondences, an absence of reconstructable shared morphology, and evidence that much shared lexical material has been borrowed from Chinese into Tibeto-Burman. In opposition to this view, scholars in favor of the Sino-Tibetan hypothesis such as W. South Coblin, Graham Thurgood, James Matisoff, and Gong Hwang-cherng have argued that there are regular correspondences in sounds as well as in grammar. One of the chief difficulties of applying the comparative method to the Sino-Tibetan languages is the morphological