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| | The Sino-Tibetan Language Family |
 | | The ancestral Proto-Sino-Tibetan language is thought to have originated somewhere in the Himalayan plateau, the source of the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia, including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, and Irrawaddy. |
 | | Other major languages are Yue or Cantonese, spoken in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces; Wu, spoken in Shanghai and Zhejiang province; Hakka, spoken in Guangdong and Jiangxi provinces, and Fukienese or Min, spoken in Fujian and Guangdong provinces and in Taiwan. |
 | | Most scholars use the term 'language' to refer to the major varieties of Chinese such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Min, and Hakka, and the term 'dialect' to refer to distinctions within these languages, e.g., Beijing dialect of Mandarin or Toishan dialect of Cantonese. |
| www.nvtc.gov /lotw/months/may/SinoTibetanLanguageFamily.htm (836 words) |
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