Shanghai team resolves language dispute

A team from Shanghai says they have evidence to support the view that the Chinese language family emerged in northern China and began to split into diversified branches about 5,900 years ago.

It is believed that their findings, published in Nature, will help settle the debate about the origin and divergence of the language family.

The Sino-Tibetan language, part of the Chinese language family and the second-largest in the world after Indo-European, consists of more than 400 tongues and dialects and has approximately 1.5 billion native speakers. But the location and timing of its emergence and divergence have long been disputed.

The Northern Origin Hypothesis supposes that the initial divergence was around 4,000 to 6,000 years ago in the Yellow River basin of northern China. The Southwestern Origin Hypothesis suggests divergence more than 9,000 years ago from southwest Sichuan Province in China or northeast India, where a high diversity of Tibeto-Burman languages exists today.

The research team led by population geneticist Jin Li and linguist Pan Wuyun from Fudan University, conducted an interdisciplinary research, integrating linguistics, evolutionary biology and archeology to examine both hypotheses.

Their findings, after reconstructing the evolution of 109 Sino-Tibetan languages, were in agreement with the Northern Origin Hypothesis and they estimated that the initial divergence was around 5,900 years ago, leading to a dichotomy of Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages.

Along with archeological evidence, they showed that population growth and expansion in northwest and southwest China some 6,000 years ago was related to the initial Sino-Tibetan language. 

Their results also suggested that the divergence and development of Sino-Tibetan language could be associated with the development of the Yangshao (5000-3000 BC) and Majiayao Neolithic (3300-2100 BC) cultures.