Language evolves in a similar way to biology Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Alamy

Although Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese languages sound completely different from one another, they are all derived from a common ancestral tongue. A new analysis suggests the ancient language might have emerged in northern China and spread to the south and west with agriculture.

Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan and about 400 other languages all belong to a group called Sino-Tibetan languages because of their shared origin. The languages are spoken by over 20 per cent of the world’s population, only second to the Indo-European language group that includes English and Spanish.

Menghan Zhang at Fudan University in Shanghai and his colleagues wanted to find out where the Sino-Tibetan languages originated. Because languages evolve and diverge just like biological species, the team applied statistical tools commonly used by biologists to build an evolutionary tree for Sino-Tibetan languages.


The team compared how words that shared the same meaning are pronounced in different languages. Generally, two languages with many words sounding alike are more closely related than two languages with fewer similar words.

The team produced an evolutionary tree for the languages and combined this with archaeological evidence of how people moved, such as the spreading of pottery and architecture styles, to conclude that the ancestral language to Sino-Tibetan languages arose in present-day northern China.

Although it’s still unclear when the ancient language was first spoken, it split into two major branches about 6,000 years ago. One spread southwards, and the other spread to Tibet and south Asia. This timeline aligns with the spread of agriculture in ancient Asia, says Zhang.

The finding contradicts previous research, which mapped the spread of ancient human genes and concluded the Sino-Tibetan population probably originated in southwest China, along with the language.

“It would be a mistake to call the matter settled,” says Zev Handel at the University of Washington, who was not involved with the project.

Vocabulary is easily influenced, and completely unrelated languages sometimes have words that sound and mean the same by coincidence, he says.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1153-z