The
Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually unintelligible
Tibeto-Burman languagesThe Tibeto-Burman family of languages is spoken in various central, east, south and southeast Asian countries, including Burma , Tibet, northern Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, parts of central China , northern parts of Nepal, eastern parts of Bangladesh , Bhutan, northern parts of...
spoken primarily by
Tibetan peopleThe Tibetan people are indigenous to Tibet and surrounding areas stretching from Central Asia in the North and West to Myanmar and China Proper in the East and India, Nepal and Bhutan to the south.-Demographics:...
s who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering South Asia, including the
Tibetan PlateauThe Tibetan Plateau , also known as the Tibel-Qingai Plateau or Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is a vast, elevated plateau in Central Asia covering most of the Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai Province in China and Ladakh in Kashmir, India...
and the northern Indian subcontinent in
BaltistanBaltistan , also known as بلتیول in the Balti language, is a region in northern Pakistan , bordering Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. It is situated in the Karakoram mountains just to the south of K2, the world's second highest mountain. It is an extremely mountainous region, with an average...
,
LadakhLadakh is a region situated in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir between the Kunlun mountain range in the north and the main Great Himalayas to the south...
,
NepalNepal , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked country in South Asia and the world's youngest republic. It is bordered to the north by the People's Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India...
,
SikkimSikkim is a landlocked Indian state nestled in the Himalayas. It is the least populous state in India and the second-smallest in area after Goa. The thumb-shaped state borders Nepal in the west, the Tibet Autonomous Region of China to the north and the east and Bhutan in the southeast...
, and
BhutanThe Kingdom of Bhutan is a landlocked nation in South Asia, located at the eastern end of the Himalaya Mountains and is bordered to the south, east and west by the Republic of India and to the north by People's Republic of China. Bhutan is separated from the nearby state of Nepal to the west by...
. The
classical written formClassical Tibetan refers to the language of any text written in Tibetan after the Old Tibetan period and before the modern period, but in particular refers to the language of early canonical texts translated from other languages, especially Sanskrit...
is a major regional literary language, particularly for its use in
BuddhistBuddhism, as traditionally conceived, is a path of salvation attained through insight into the ultimate nature of reality. It encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha...
literature.
For political reasons, the dialects of central Tibet (including
LhasaLhasa, and sometimes spelled Lasa, is the administrative capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China. It is located at the foot of Mount Gephel....
),
KhamKham , is a region presently divided between the Chinese provinces of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and Sichuan where Khampas, a subgroup within the Tibetan ethnicity, live. It is also one of the three traditional provinces claimed by the Tibetan government-in-exile...
s, and
AmdoAmdo is one of the three traditional states of Tibet, the other two being Ü-Tsang and Kham; it is also the birth place of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Amdo encompasses a large area from the Machu River to the Drichu river...
in China are considered dialects of a single Tibetan language, while Dzongkha, Sikkimese,
SherpaSherpa is a language spoken in parts of Nepal and Sikkim mainly by the Sherpa community...
, and
LadakhiThe Ladakhi language, more generally called Western Archaic Tibetan when the Balti and Burig or Purig or Purki dialects are included, is the predominant language in the Ladakh and Baltistan regions of the Jammu and Kashmir state of India. Ladakhi is closely related to Tibetan, and the Ladakhi...
are generally considered to be separate languages, although their speakers may consider themselves to be ethnically Tibetan. However, this does not reflect linguistic reality: Dzongkha and Sherpa, for example, are closer to Lhasa Tibetan than Khams or Amdo are.
The Tibetan languages are spoken by approximately 6 million people. Lhasa Tibetan is spoken by approximately 150,000 exile speakers who have moved from modern-day Tibet to
IndiaIndia, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Bay of Bengal...
and other countries. Tibetan is also spoken by groups of ethnic minorities in Tibet who have lived in close proximity to Tibetans for centuries, but nevertheless retain their own languages and cultures. Although some of the Qiangic peoples of
KhamKham , is a region presently divided between the Chinese provinces of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and Sichuan where Khampas, a subgroup within the Tibetan ethnicity, live. It is also one of the three traditional provinces claimed by the Tibetan government-in-exile...
are classified by the
People's Republic of ChinaThe People's Republic of China , commonly known as China, is the largest country in East Asia and the most populous in the world with over 1.3 billion people, approximately one-fifth of the world's population...
as ethnic Tibetans,
Qiangic languagesQiangic or Kiangic, formerly known as Dzorgai, is a language group of the northeastern Tibeto-Burman of Sino-Tibetan language famlily, spoken mainly in Southwestern China, including Sichuan, Tibet, and Yunnan....
are not Tibetan, but rather form their own branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family.
Classical TibetanClassical Tibetan refers to the language of any text written in Tibetan after the Old Tibetan period and before the modern period, but in particular refers to the language of early canonical texts translated from other languages, especially Sanskrit...
was not a tonal language, but some varieties such as Central and Khams Tibetan have developed tone. (Amdo and Ladakhi/Balti are without tone.) Tibetan morphology can generally be described as agglutinative, although Classical Tibetan was largely analytic.
Languages
According to Bradley, The languages cluster as follows:
- Ladakhi
The Ladakhi language, more generally called Western Archaic Tibetan when the Balti and Burig or Purig or Purki dialects are included, is the predominant language in the Ladakh and Baltistan regions of the Jammu and Kashmir state of India. Ladakhi is closely related to Tibetan, and the Ladakhi...
('Western Archaic Tibetan', including BaltiBalti is a language spoken in Baltistan, in the Northern Areas of Pakistan and adjoining parts of Ladakh, India. Baltistan - before 1948 - was part of Ladakh province. The language is a dialect of the Tibetan language. It is mutually intelligible with Ladakhi and Burig...
and PurikThe Burig, or Purik, are another group of Tibetan Muslims with small dardic admixture, who live south of the Balti in Ladakh. Most of them live in Ladakh and Baltistan, especially in Kargil, although significant numbers reside in Leh....
) (non-tonal)
- Central Tibetan
The Central Tibetan languages are the tonal varieties of Tibetan apart from Khams.The composition of the Central Tibetan languages per Bradley , with dialect information from the Tibetan Dialects Project at the University of Bern, is:...
(tonal)
- Western Innovative Tibetan, primarily in Ladakh
Ladakh is a region situated in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir between the Kunlun mountain range in the north and the main Great Himalayas to the south...
and the border areas
- Dbus Ü (alternate romanisations of ) (Central Tibetan proper), in Ngari, Ü-Tsang
Ü-Tsang , or Tsang-Ü, is one of the three traditional provinces of Tibet, the other two being Amdo and Kham...
(including LhasaLhasa, and sometimes spelled Lasa, is the administrative capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China. It is located at the foot of Mount Gephel....
), and northern Nepal border areas
- Northern Tibetan: Nagchu and southern Qinghai
' is a province of the People's Republic of China, named after Qinghai Lake. It borders Gansu on the northeast, the Xinjiang Autonomous Region on the northwest, Sichuan on the southeast, and Tibet Autonomous Region on the southwest.- History :Qinghai was only relatively recently made a province...
- Southern Tibetan: Southern Ü-Tsang, Sikkim
Sikkim is a landlocked Indian state nestled in the Himalayas. It is the least populous state in India and the second-smallest in area after Goa. The thumb-shaped state borders Nepal in the west, the Tibet Autonomous Region of China to the north and the east and Bhutan in the southeast...
, and BhutanThe Kingdom of Bhutan is a landlocked nation in South Asia, located at the eastern end of the Himalaya Mountains and is bordered to the south, east and west by the Republic of India and to the north by People's Republic of China. Bhutan is separated from the nearby state of Nepal to the west by...
, such as DzongkhaDzongkha , occasionally Ngalopkha, is the national language of Bhutan...
, SherpaSherpa is a language spoken in parts of Nepal and Sikkim mainly by the Sherpa community...
, Sikkimese
- Khams Tibetan
Kham Ke is the eastern-most Tibetan language, spoken in Eastern Tibet or Kham...
(tonal); spoken in Qinghai' is a province of the People's Republic of China, named after Qinghai Lake. It borders Gansu on the northeast, the Xinjiang Autonomous Region on the northwest, Sichuan on the southeast, and Tibet Autonomous Region on the southwest.- History :Qinghai was only relatively recently made a province...
, ChamdoChamdo , population about 86.280 in Kham in the eastern Tibet Autonomous Region, is Tibet's third largest city . It is located about 480 km from Lhasa, on the road the distance covers 1120 km or 1030 km...
, Sichuan' is a province in Southwestern China with its capital in Chengdu. The current name of the province, 四川 , is an abbreviation of 四川路 , or "Four circuits of rivers", which is itself abbreviated from 川峡四路 , or "Four circuits of rivers and gorges", named after the division of the...
, YunnanYunnan is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the far southwest of the country spanning approximately 394,000 square kilometers . The capital of the province is Kunming...
- Amdo Tibetan
Amdo, also Anduo, Ngambo, is the northeastern-most Tibetan language. It is used alongside Central Tibetan and Khams Tibetan in broadcasting, but shares the Classical Tibetan orthography and is not accorded the status of a separate language. However, it is intelligible neither with Khams nor with...
(non-tonal); spoken in Qinghai, Gansu' is a province located in the northwest of the People's Republic of China. It lies between Quinghai, Inner Mongolia, and the Huangtu plateaus, and borders Mongolia to the north and Xinjiang to the west. The Yellow River passes the southern part of the province. It has a population of nearly 31...
, Sichuan
Varying classifications are found. Some group Khams and Amdo together as Eastern Tibetan (not to be confused with
East BodishThe East Bodish languages are those Bodish languages not covered by the name Tibetan. They include Khengkha, Dakpa, Dzala, Bumthang, and Black Mountain Mönpa. The most divergent is Dakpa .-References:...
, which is not ethnically Tibetan). Others break up Central Tibetan. Phrases such as 'Central Tibetan' and 'Central Bodish' may or may not be synonymous: Southern (Central) Tibetan can be found as Southern Bodish, for example; 'Central Tibetan' may mean dBus or all tonal lects apart from Khams; 'Western Bodish' may be used for the non-tonal western lects while 'Western Tibetan' is used for the tonal lects, or 'Bodish' may even be used for other branches of the
Tibeto-Kanauri languagesThe Tibeto-Kanauri or Bodish-Himalayish languages are a proposed intermediate level of classification of the Tibeto-Burman languages, centered on the Tibetan and Kanauri languages...
.
The Tibetan languages used for broadcasting within China are
Standard TibetanStandard Tibetan, often called Central Tibetan, in Tibetan script: བོད་སྐད་, is the official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It is based on the speech of Lhasa, an Ü-Tsang dialect of Dbus Ü, one of the Central Tibetan languages...
(based on the Ü dialect of
LhasaLhasa, and sometimes spelled Lasa, is the administrative capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China. It is located at the foot of Mount Gephel....
used as a
lingua francaA lingua franca is a language systematically used to communicate between persons not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both persons' mother tongues.Lingua franca is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic history or...
throughout
Ü-TsangÜ-Tsang , or Tsang-Ü, is one of the three traditional provinces of Tibet, the other two being Amdo and Kham...
),
KhamsKham Ke is the eastern-most Tibetan language, spoken in Eastern Tibet or Kham...
, and
AmdoAmdo is one of the three traditional states of Tibet, the other two being Ü-Tsang and Kham; it is also the birth place of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Amdo encompasses a large area from the Machu River to the Drichu river...
.
Writing systems
Most Tibetan languages are written in an Indic script, with a historically conservative orthography (see below) that helps unify the Tibetan-language area. However, some Ladakhi and Balti speakers write with the Urdu script. The Tibetan script fell out of use in Pakistani Baltistan hundreds of years ago upon the region's adoption of Islam. However, increased concern among Pakistani Baltis for the preservation of their language and traditions, especially in the face of strong Panjabi cultural influence throughout Pakistan, has fostered renewed interest in reviving Tibetan script and using it alongside the Arabic-Persian script. Many shops in Baltistan's capital Skardu in Pakistan's "Northern Areas" region have begun supplementing signs written in the Arabic-Persian script with signs written in Tibetan script. Baltis see this initiative not as separatist but rather as part of an attempt to preserve the cultural aspects of their region which has shared a close history with neighbors like Kashmiris and Panjabis since the arrival of Islam in the region many centuries ago.
Historical phonology
Old Tibetan phonology is rather accurately rendered by the script. The finals were pronounced devoiced although they are written as voiced, the prefix letters assimilated their voicing to the root letters. The graphic combinations
hr and
lh represent voiceless and not necessarily aspirate correspondences to
r and
l respectively. The letter ' was pronounced as a voiced guttural fricative before vowels but as homorganic prenasalization before consonants. Whether the gigu
verso had phonetic meaning or not remains controversial.
For instance,
Srong rtsan Sgam po would have been pronounced (now pronounced in Lhasa Tibetan) and babs would have been pronounced (pronounced in Lhasa Tibetan).
Already in the 9th century the process of cluster simplification, devoicing and tonogenesis had begun in the central dialects can be shown with Tibetan words transliterated in other languages, particularly
Middle ChineseMiddle Chinese , or Ancient Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
but also
UyghurUyghur , formerly known as Eastern Turki, is a Turkic language spoken in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a Central Asian region administered by China, mainly by the Uyghur ethnic group. It is spoken by 10 million in China, mostly in Xinjiang...
.
The concurrence of the evidence indicated above enables us to form the following outline of the evolution of Tibetan. In the 9th century, as shown by the bilingual Tibeto-
ChineseChinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of languages mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
treaty of 821–822 found in front of
LhasaLhasa, and sometimes spelled Lasa, is the administrative capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China. It is located at the foot of Mount Gephel....
's
JokhangThe Jokhang, , also called the Jokang, Jokhang Temple, Jokhang Monastery or Tsuklakang , was the first Buddhist temple in Tibet, located on Barkhor Square in Lhasa...
, the complex initial clusters had already been reduced, and the process of tonogenesis was likely well underway.
The next change took place in Tsang (Gtsang) dialects: The ra
-tags were altered into retroflexIn phonetics, retroflex consonants are consonant sounds used in some languages. The tongue articulates with the roof of the oral cavity behind the alveolar ridge, and may even be curled back to touch the palate: that is, they are articulated in the postalveolar to palatal region of the...
consonants, and the ya
-tags became palatals.
Later on the superscribed letters and finals d
and s
disappeared, except in the east and west. It was at this stage that the language spread in Lahul and Spiti, where the superscribed letters were silent, the d
and g
finals were hardly heard, and as
, os
, us
were ai
, oi
, ui
. The words introduced from Tibet into the border languages at that time differ greatly from those introduced at an earlier period.
The other changes are more recent and restricted to Ü and Tsang. In Ü, the vowel sounds a
, o
, u
have now mostly umlauted to ä
, ö
, ü
when followed by the coronal sounds i
, d
, s
, l
and n
. The same holds for Tsang with the exception of l which merely lengthens the vowel. The medials have become aspirate tenues with a low intonation, which also marks the words having a simple initial consonant; while the former aspirates and the complex initials simplified in speech are uttered with a high tone, shrill and rapidly.
See also
- Languages of China
China's many different ethnic groups speak many different languages, collectively called Zhōngguó Yǔwén , literally "speech and writing of China" which mainly span six linguistic families. Most of them are dissimilar morphologically and phonetically and are mutually unintelligible...
- Tibetan transcription (PRC)
- Tibetan transcription (THDL)
- Tibetan transliteration (Wylie)
Tibetan languages and dialects
- Standard Tibetan
Standard Tibetan, often called Central Tibetan, in Tibetan script: བོད་སྐད་, is the official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. It is based on the speech of Lhasa, an Ü-Tsang dialect of Dbus Ü, one of the Central Tibetan languages...
- Khams Tibetan language
Kham Ke is the eastern-most Tibetan language, spoken in Eastern Tibet or Kham...
- Balti language
Balti is a language spoken in Baltistan, in the Northern Areas of Pakistan and adjoining parts of Ladakh, India. Baltistan - before 1948 - was part of Ladakh province. The language is a dialect of the Tibetan language. It is mutually intelligible with Ladakhi and Burig...
- Ladakhi language
The Ladakhi language, more generally called Western Archaic Tibetan when the Balti and Burig or Purig or Purki dialects are included, is the predominant language in the Ladakh and Baltistan regions of the Jammu and Kashmir state of India. Ladakhi is closely related to Tibetan, and the Ladakhi...
- Dzongkha language
Dzongkha , occasionally Ngalopkha, is the national language of Bhutan...
- Sherpa language
Sherpa is a language spoken in parts of Nepal and Sikkim mainly by the Sherpa community...
- Groma language
Groma is a language spoken in Sikkim and Tibet. It belongs to the southern group of Tibetan languages. Its speakers identify as Tibetans....
- Sikkimese Tibetan language
External links