The world’s second-largest language family originated not in India as many have theorized, but in what is now northern China, according to an article published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.

The more than 400 tongues known collectively as the Sino-Tibetan language family emerged from the Yellow River basin around 6,000 years ago, a team of researchers from Fudan University in Shanghai concluded. Sino-Tibetan — which includes Mandarin, Tibetan, and Burmese — is spoken by over 1.5 billion people worldwide, more than any other language family apart from Indo-European, which includes English and Spanish.

The East Asian languages were disseminated through agricultural expansion over the course of several millennia. The researchers determined their Chinese origin by comparing computer-based language data and anthropological studies, according to the report. (Image: IC)