The Sino-Tibetan languages form the largest language family in the world in terms of native speakers, of whom there are some 1.4 billion spread across East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. The family consists of two branches: Sinitic, consisting of the Chinese languages (including Cantonese and Hakka), and Tibeto-Burman, which as well as Tibetan and Burmese includes several hundred further languages spoken from the Tibetan plateau in the north to the Malay peninsula in the south, and from northern Pakistan in the west to northeastern Vietnam in the east.

This four-volume collection focuses on journal articles, with a small selection of seminal contributions from the book literature. Although the majority of the material is drawn from sources published in the past thirty years, some classic pieces are included; for example, a paper on Tibetan initials by F. K. Li which was published in 1933 and has never been surpassed.

This new Major Work from Routledge is a set which someone new to the field of Sino-Tibetan studies could go to in order to get a general idea of the development and current state of the art of the subject, as aside from the seminal articles, there are introductions by the Editor that contextualise the articles and also cite relevant literature that built on the seminal articles. A veteran could also go to these volumes as an easy source for the most frequently cited articles in the field.