Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan and about 400 other languages all belong to a group called Sino-Tibetan languages because of their shared origin. The languages are spoken by over 20 per cent of the world's population, only second to the Indo-European language group that includes English and Spanish.
The Burmese language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman group of the Tibeto-Chinese family of languages, but, unlike Chinese, it is not ideographic. That is, it does not have characters which originated as pictures, but an alphabet, of eleven vowels and thirty-two consonants, derived from the Pahlavi script of South India.