Burmo-Qiangic languages

The Burmo-Qiangic or Eastern Tibeto-Burman languages are a proposed family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Southwest China and Myanmar. It consists of the Lolo-Burmese and Qiangic branches, including the extinct Tangut language.

Classification
Guillaume Jacques & Alexis Michaud (2011) argue for a Burmo-Qiangic branch of Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman) with two primary subbranches, Qiangic and Lolo-Burmese. Similarly, David Bradley (2008) proposes an Eastern Tibeto-Burman branch that includes Burmic (a.k.a. Lolo-Burmese) and Qiangic. Bradley notes that Lolo-Burmese and Qiangic share some unique lexical items, even though they are morphologically quite different; whereas all Lolo-Burmese languages are tonal and analytical, Qiangic languages are often non-tonal and possess agglutinative morphology. However the position of Naic is unclear, as it has been grouped as Lolo-Burmese by Lama (2012), but as Qiangic by Jacques & Michaud (2011) and Bradley (2008).

Sun (1988) also proposed a similar classification that grouped Qiangic and Lolo-Burmese together.

Jacques' & Michaud's (2011) proposed tree is as follows.

Bradley's (2008) proposal is as follows. Note that Bradley calls Lolo-Burmese Burmic, which is not to be confused with Burmish, and calls Loloish Ngwi.

However, Chirkova (2012) doubts that Qiangic is a valid genetic unit, and considers Ersu, Shixing, Namuyi, and Pumi all as separate Tibeto-Burman branches that are part of a Qiangic Sprachbund, rather than as part of a coherent Qiangic phylogenetic branch. This issue has also been further discussed by Yu (2012).

Lee & Sagart (2008) argue that Bai is a Tibeto-Burman language that has borrowed very heavily from Old Chinese. Lee & Sagart (2008) note that word relating to rice and pig agriculture tend to be non-Chinese, and that the genetic non-Chinese layer of Bai shows similarities with Proto-Loloish.

Branches
Yu (2012:206–207) lists the following well-established coherent branches (including individual languages, in italics below) that could likely all fit into a wider Burmo-Qiangic group, in geographical order from north to south.


 * 1) (Baima) [possible Burmo-Qiangic substratum]
 * 2) Qiang
 * 3) rGyalrong
 * 4) Lavrung
 * 5) Ergong
 * 6) Choyo
 * 7) nDrapa
 * 8) Guiqiong
 * 9) Minyak
 * 10) Ersuic
 * 11) Namuyi
 * 12) Shixing
 * 13) Naish
 * 14) Prinmi
 * 15) Lolo-Burmese
 * 16) (Bai) [possible Burmo-Qiangic substratum]

Additionally, Tangut, now extinct, is generally classified as a Qiangic language.

Yu (2012:215–218) notes that Ersuic and Naic languages could possibly group together, since they share many features with each other that are not found in Lolo-Burmese or other Qiangic groups.

Proto-language reconstructions for some of these branches include:
 * Proto-Rma (Sims 2017)
 * Proto-Prinmi (Sims 2017)
 * Proto-Ersuic (Yu 2012)
 * Proto-Naish (Jacques & Michaud 2011)
 * Proto-Lolo-Burmese (Matisoff 2003)
 * Proto-Bai (Wang 2006)

Lexical evidence
Jacques & Michaud (2011) list the following lexical items as likely Burmo-Qiangic lexical innovations.