The phylogenetic position of Tshangla

What is it about?

Tshangla is a group of languages of Eastern Bhutan belonging to the Trans-Himalayan aka Sino-Tibetan language family. Tshangla was often considered to be linguistically closely related to Tibetan, but no evidence for this has been presented, so that this classification is purely based on intuition. In this paper, we show empirical evidence that Tshangla is not closely related to Tibetan, but shares more ties with languages of the Indian-Burmese borderland. Additionally, we present innovations of Tshangla, that is features which allow us to classify Tshangla as an own branch of the Trans-Himalayan language family. By doing so, we hope to enhance our understanding of the Trans-Himalayan family tree and to learn more about the history of individual languages and small, underrepresented languages and ethnolinguistic groups within the language family.

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