The History of the Sinitic (Chinese) Languages

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The Sinitic or Chinese languages are the largest branch of the massive Sino-Tibetan language family. It contains hundreds of languages and dialects with over a billion speakers. Languages in this family are characterized by a subject-verb-object sentence structure, various tonal systems, and a common use of Chinese characters.

This video presents the history and evolution of the Sinitic languages from 1900 BCE to the present.

Disclaimer: all dates are approximations, and there are many competing hypotheses regarding the development of these languages that are not represented in this video.

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[CostasMelas]

Great work in a very difficult object. The tree-diagram in the info is very nice and useful

[GaryHField]

I hope you could feature the history of Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages too. Thank you so much.

[李白-fu]

It's quite a tragedy for language nerds that most Sinitic languages and dialects will die before the end of this century with the dominant promotion of Beijing Mandarin and American English

[deacudaniel]

Can't describe how long I was waiting for this masterpiece!❤

[yunyitsui]

Greater Bai languages used to be widely spread in southwest China like Min（Hokkien） in southeast China, but Greater Bai languages is endangered today.

[화이팅-tq]

great job!!
you're amongst the best mappers.

[lexi]

Bai literally said: aight imma head out😂

[vtron]

I actually have a question. How much research does it take to do all this. I tried to make a video on the Oracle bone script and resorted to looking for sources on the Wikipedia references section for that article. However, most were somewhat inaccessible or unable to be cited. I see that you only cited Wikipedia (as a whole), the Britannia (as a whole) and one book. Is Wikipedia becoming more credible, enough to cite it as a source itself? What is your research process. I’d really like to know because I like to research and make videos about these kinds of things. Thank you and awesome video!

[enochchung]

Love your vids! Keep up the great work!

[zacharyyan]

2:22 Old Chinese looks exactly like France right there

[srliampham]

Well, awsome video, let's check the DRAGONHISTORIAN time

[李白-fu]

Merry Mid-Autumn festival and reunion with your family!

[yujiang]

I recently learnt that Bai language could also be a Tibeto-burman language(Wikipedia and Britainnica think that Bai possibly belongs to Loloish or an independent branch Baic of tibeto-burman). Linguists don't have an exact conclusion on the classification of bai. Don't forget to add Bai language to history of tibeto-burman and expect for your next video of languages! :)

[paulsitt]

Wow, Mandarin emerged quite earlier than I expected. I guess even people back then were too lazy to pronounce the final consonants. I wonder if there's any significant sound changes in Mandarin in it's almost thousand years of existence.

[SinoLAX]

People!! All you need to do to preserve your own dialect is to use it. Use it at home, use it with friends. It is tragic that languages disappear, but when things become obsolete, they simply go away. So exercise your tongue, hating won't do no good.

[wez]

China needs to be like India and start allowing the other Chinese languages besides Mandarin have their own official regional representation. I was shocked that there were movies/tv shows/music besides Hindi in India (like Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, etc). There is Cantonese and Hokkien in media but if it wasn't for the existence of HK and Taiwan, they wouldn't even be recognized at the national level in media.

[davidwong]

Hakka Chinese from Hong Kong is a pretty cool Chinese dialect, quite similar to Cantonese but sounds slightly different. I speak it but less and less people are speaking it in Hong Kong, only the older generations speak it. 🙁

[Republic_of_China_No.]

이 영상에서는 월어와 오어가 당나라 때 갈라져 나온 것으로 나왔는데, 두 방언이 당나라 때 중고한어에서 분화되었다는 정황이나 문헌 자료가 실제로 있나요?

[SummerStory]

Overall correct in my opinion, though Hakka probably migrated much earlier than it appeared in this video.

[Alsayid]

This makes me wonder what kind of languages were being spoken in the entire rest of what is now coastal China during the time Old Chinese was restricted to a small area south of Peking. Like, who lived in the area of Shanghai? And who lived in the area of Canton? Did they look very different from the people who live there now? Fascinating to ponder.