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(Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Gan, Min, Hakka, Xiang, Vue). They are all written 
in Chinese characters. Each syllable has a different character so that the writing is not 
alphabetic. There are over 50,000 characters, 6000 of which are needed to read a 
newspaper. Even though the different languages have different pronunciations, the 
meanings of characters are the same. 
The languages in the Tibeto-Burman Branch are spoken in Burma (Burmese, 
Karen) Thailand and Laos (Lisu, Lahu), Southern China (Chin, Vi), Tibet 
(Tibetan), Bhutan (Jonkha), Nepal (Sherpa, Newari), and eastern India (Mizo, 
Manipuri). 
When written, the scripts are derived either from the curly scripts of south 
India or the angular scripts of north India. 
The Tai and Southern Branches are spoken in Thailand and Laos (Thai and 
Lao written in curly south Indian scripts, and the unwritten Shan) and amongst the 
tribal people of Southern China (Chuang, Vao, She). 
Thai has noun classifiers. These are groups of words that go with certain types 
of nouns. KHON goes with people nouns (except royalty or sacred people), TUA 
goes with animals, IEM goes with sharp or pointed objects, and KHAN goes with 
objects with handles. 
The language family is thought to have originated in northern China around the 
Yangse River valley. Some linguists consider the Tai Languages to be a separate 
family. 

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The Malayo-Polynesian Family of Languages 
Also known as Austronesian, the Malayo-Polynesian Family is made up of 
over 1000 languages spread throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans as well South- 
East Asia. Although covering a large geographical area, the languages are remarkably 
uniform in structure. 
The most common are Malay and Indonesian (which are actually dialects of a 
single language). Malay was written in the Arabic script until the 20th Century when 
the Latin alphabet was adopted. 
This family includes the languages of Indonesia: Javanese, Sundanese,