The
Sino-Tibetan languages, sometimes known as
Tibeto-Burman or
Trans-Himalayan, are a
family of more than 400 languages spoken in
East Asia,
Southeast Asia and
South Asia. The family is second only to the
Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers. The Sino-Tibetan languages with the most native speakers are the
varieties of Chinese (1.2 billion speakers),
Burmese (33 million) and the
Tibetic languages (8 million). Many Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by small communities in remote mountain areas and are poorly documented.