The Sino-Tibetan Languages

The Sino-Tibetan Languages, edited by Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla, published by Routledge in 2003, is an edited scholarly reference surveying the Sino-Tibetan language family, which includes Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese and hundreds of smaller languages across East and Southeast Asia, with individual chapters contributed by specialists in particular branches and languages of the family. Its strength is that specialist, per language authorship across a family too vast and internally diverse for any single scholar to treat with equal authority, drawing together linguists who work directly on each branch. Its limit is that Sino-Tibetan's own internal classification remains a genuinely disputed question among historical linguists, contributors to the same volume do not all agree on how the family's branches relate to one another, so a claim about the family's overall structure should be attributed to a specific contributor's position rather than presented as the volume's single settled conclusion.