TheSal languages, also known as theBrahmaputran languages, are a branch ofTibeto-Burman languages spoken innortheast India, as well as parts ofBangladesh,Myanmar (Burma), andChina.

Ethnologue calls the group "Jingpho–Konyak-Garo–Bodo", whileScott DeLancey (2015)^[1] refers to it as "Bodo-Konyak-Garo-Jinghpaw" (BKJ). Glottolog lists this branch as “Brahmaputran (brah1260)”, as the languages occur around theBrahmaputra Valley.

Scott DeLancey (2015)^[1] considers the Sal languages, which he refers to as Garo-Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw (BKJ), to be part of a widerCentral Tibeto-Burman group.

Benedict (1972:7) noted that theBodo–Garo,Konyak, andJingpho (Kachin) languages, as well as the extinctChairel language, shared distinctive roots for "sun" and "fire".

Burling (1983) proposed a grouping of the Bodo–Garo, Konyak (Northern Naga), and Jingpho languages, characterized by several sharedlexical innovations, including:

• *sal "sun"^[2]
• *war "fire"^[3]
• *s-raŋ "sky"^[4]
• *wa "father"^[5]
• *nu "mother"^[6]

Burling (1983) called the proposed group Sal, after the wordssal,san andjan for "sun" in various of these languages.Coupe (2012:201–204) argues that some of Burling's proposed innovations are either not attested across the Sal languages, or have cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages. Nevertheless, Matisoff (2013)^[7] accepts Burling's Sal group, and considers *s-raŋ 'sky/rain' and *nu 'mother' to be the most convincing Sal innovations.

The family is generally presented with three branches (Burling 2003:175,Thurgood 2003:11):

• TheBodo–Garo languages, including theBodo andKoch languages, are spoken in the northeast Indian states ofAssam,Meghalaya andTripura.
• TheKonyak languages are spoken by theNaga people in southeasternArunachal Pradesh and northeasternNagaland (both in northeastern India). This group is called Eastern Naga byBurling (1983) and Northern Naga by other authors. (The remaining languages of Nagaland belong to the separateKuki-Chin-Naga group.)
• The Kachinic orJingpho–Luish languages includeJingpho (Jinghpaw, Singhpo or Kachin), spoken in northernBurma and adjacent regions, and theLuish (or Sak) languages spoken in western Burma.

Shafer had grouped the first two as his Baric division, andBradley (1997:20) also combines them as a subbranch.

Bradley (1997) tentatively considersPyu andKuki-Chin to be possibly related to Sal, but is uncertain about this.

Peterson (2009)^[8] considersMru-Hkongso to be a separate Tibeto-Burman branch, but notes that Mru-Hkongso shares similarities with Bodo–Garo that could be due to the early split of Mruic from a Tibeto-Burman branch that included Bodo–Garo.

TheBrahmaputran branch of van Driem (2011) has three variants:

• Bodo–Garo andKonyak.^[9]
• Bodo–Garo, Konyak, andDhimalish.^[10]
• Bodo–Garo, Konyak, Dhimalish, andKachin–Luic.^[10]

The smallest is his most recent, and the one van Driem considers a well-established low-level group of Sino-Tibetan.^[11] However, Dhimalish is not accepted as a Sal language byGlottolog.^[12] Sotrug (2015)^[13] and Gerber, et al. (2016)^[14] consider Dhimalish to be particularly closely related to theKiranti languages rather than to the Sal languages.

James Matisoff (2012)^[15] makes the following observations about the Sal grouping.

• AlthoughBodo–Garo and Northeastern Naga (Konyak) are indeed closely related, Jingpho and Northeastern Naga (Konyak) seem to be even more closely related to each other than Jingpho and Bodo-Garo are to each other.
• Luish is the Tibeto-Burman branch most closely related to Jingpho, for which further evidence is provided in Matisoff (2013).^[7]
• Similarities between Jingpho andNungish are due to contact. Thus, Nungish is not particularly closely related to Jingpho, and is not a Sal language. On the other hand,Lolo-Burmese appears to be more closely related to Nungish than to Jingpho.

Matisoff (2012) notes that these Tibeto-Burman branches did not split off neatly in a tree-like fashion, but rather form alinkage. Nevertheless, Matisoff (2013:30)^[7] still provides the followingStammbaum for the Sal branch.

The unclassified extinctTaman language of northern Myanmar displays some similarities with Luish languages, Jingpho, and Bodo-Garo, but it is undetermined whether Taman is a Sal language or not.^[16]

• Benedict, Paul K. (1972),Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus(PDF), Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,ISBN 978-0-521-08175-7.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Bradley, David (1997),"Tibeto-Burman languages and classification"(PDF), in Bradley, David (ed.),Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas,Papers in South East Asian linguistics, vol. 14, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, pp. 1–71,ISBN 978-0-85883-456-9.
• Burling, Robbins (1983),"The Sal Languages"(PDF),Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area,7 (2):1–32.
• —— (2003), "The Tibeto-Burman languages of northeast India", in Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.),Sino-Tibetan Languages, London: Routledge, pp. 169–191,ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1.
• Coupe, Alexander R. (2012),"Overcounting numeral systems and their relevance to sub-grouping in the Tibeto-Burman languages of Nagaland"(PDF),Language and Linguistics,13 (1):193–220.
• van Driem, George (2001),Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region, BRILL,ISBN 978-90-04-12062-4.
• —— (2014),"Trans-Himalayan"(PDF), in Owen-Smith, Thomas; Hill, Nathan W. (eds.),Trans-Himalayan Linguistics: Historical and Descriptive Linguistics of the Himalayan Area, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 11–40,ISBN 978-3-11-031083-2.
• Thurgood, Graham (2003), "A subgrouping of the Sino-Tibetan languages", in Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.),Sino-Tibetan Languages, London: Routledge, pp. 3–21,ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1.

• Sal languages

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