The Qiang languages are two Qiangic languages, Northern Qiang and Southern Qiang, of the Tibeto-Burman family spoken in Sichuan Province, Tibet (China). They are often considered "dialects" of single language (i.e. the Qiang language); however, the two vernaculars, although closely related, are divergent enough to be considered separate languages. Northern Qiang is not a tonal language while Southern Qiang is tonal. The Tibeto-Burman linguistic subfamily of the proposed Sino-Tibetan language family is spoken in various central and south Asian countries: Myanmar (Burmese language), Tibet (Tibetan language), northern Thailand (Mong language), Nepal, Bhutan, India (Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and the Ladakh region of... Sichuan (Chinese: 四川; pinyin: Sìchuān; Wade-Giles: Ssu-ch`uan; non-standard transliteration: Szechwan) is a province in central-western China with its capital at Chengdu. ... The neutrality of this article is disputed. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ... Tone refers to the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. ...

See also

• Northern Qiang language
• Southern Qiang language
• Qiang
• Qiangic languages

Northern Qiang is a Qiangic language of the Tibeto-Burman language family spoken by approximately 130,000 people in north-central Sichuan Province, China (former Tibet). ... The Qiang people (羌族; Pinyin: qiāng zú) are an ethnic group. ...

Bibliography

• Bradley, David. (1997). Tibeto-Burman languages and classification. In D. Bradley (Ed.), Papers in South East Asian linguistics: Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas (No. 14, pp. 1-71). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.