Typology of Sinitic (Chinese)

Sinitic, often referred to simply as ‘Chinese’, is a well-differentiated major branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, further divided into ten commonly recognized groups (Mandarin, Jin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Hui, Hakka, Yue, Min, and Pinghua), identified mainly on the basis of phonological criteria. Sinitic as a whole stands out for being typologically quite distant from the rest of Sino-Tibetan (i.e. the so-called ‘Tibeto-Burman’ languages): Sinitic lan-guages overwhelmingly possess verb-medial basic constituent order and isolat-ing/analytic morphology, while Tibeto-Burman languages are dominantly verb-final, and exhibit more complex and varied morphological profiles. Moreover, the Sinitic languages themselves show a considerable degree of internal variation, involving aspects as word order, morphology, grammaticalization patterns, among others. The development of Si-nitic has often been driven by contact, both within the family and with unrelated (non-Sinitic) languages: for instance, Northern Sinitic shows ‘Altaic’ features due to con-tact with Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages, while Southern Sinitic is closer to the Mainland Southeast Asian areal type due to contact with Tai-Kadai, Hmong-Mien, and Mon-Khmer. We also find Sinitic varieties in the Northwest possessing basic verb-final order and postposed markers of case and evidentiality, again due to contact (with Mon-golic and Tibetic), as well as other areas of convergence, which contribute to the complex-ity of the typology of Sinitic.