Sino-Austronesian languages

Sino-Austronesian, also called Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian, is a proposed language family suggested by linguist Laurent Sagart in 1990, linking the Austronesian languages to the Sinitic languages of China on phonological, lexical and morphological grounds. Sagart later accepted the wider Sino-Tibetan family as valid and extended the proposal to cover it, and placed the Tai-Kadai languages within Austronesian as a sister branch of Malayo-Polynesian. The hypothesis has been largely rejected by other linguists, who argue the observed similarities more likely arose from language contact than from common descent.