Tibetan

Introduction

Tibetan is a member of the Tibeto-Burmese branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is the second most populous language of the Tibeto-Burmese branch after Burmese.

Tibetan is spoken by approximately 5.5 million people in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu provinces of of the People's Republic of China as well as in Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim; and parts of Kashmir in India. There are also exile communities in Europe, Taiwan, and the United States. It is estimated that over 6 million people speak Tibetan worldwide (Ethnologue).

Along with Chinese, Tibetan has official status in the Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures in China. In the Tibet Autonomous Region, Standard Tibetan has been adopted for use in television and radio. This evolving Standard Tibetan is now widely understood and spoken as a native language in the wider Lhasa area, as well as among the diaspora communities in India, Nepal, China, Europe, and America. It also is increasingly used as a lingua franca which allows speakers from different dialect areas to communicate with each other. However, it does not yet enjoy a status comparable to that of Mandarin in Chinese communities.

The use of Tibetan in education faces serious problems. At present, some schools in Tibet teach all subjects in Chinese, especially in areas where most students are Chinese. There are also schools where Standard Tibetan is taught through the 6th grade to children who speak Chinese and their local Tibetan dialect. Finally, there are schools in which instruction is entirely in Tibetan and where Chinese is taught as a second language.

Dialects

Tibetan refers to several distinct spoken varieties that are in many instances not mutually comprehensible but which have over time shared a common literary tradition, much like Latin had enjoyed before speakers of Romance languages developed their own literary languages. This common literary tradition helped bind Tibetan communities divided by geography, politics, history, and dialectal differences.

As with all languages, making a clear distinction between languages versus dialects is extremely difficult, especially in mountanous areas that have kept linguistic communities apart. Thus, the boundaries between Tibetan and some other Himalayan languages are sometimes unclear. In general, the varieties spoken in central Tibet and nearby areas are considered Tibetan dialects, while other varieties such as Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Sherpa, and Ladakhi, are considered to be closely-related but separate languages.

Ethnologue divides the 53 varieties of Tibetan into these major dialect groups. The figures in parentheses indicate the number of varieties in each group.

Central (19)	1.99 million	China, Nepal, India
Eastern (8)	93,000	Bhutan
Northern (4)	2.3 million	China
Southern (12)	362,000	Bhutan, China, Nepal, India
Western (6)	538,000	India, China, Pakistan

Standard Tibetan is based on the Central dialect spoken around Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

Structure

Sound System

Vowels
Tibetan has eight vowels.

xxx	Front		Central	Back
x	Unrounded	Rounded	xUnrounded	xRounded
High	/i/	/ü/	xx	/u/
Mid	/e/	/ö/	x	/o/
Low	//	x	/a/	x

Tones
Tibetan is a tonal language. This means that every syllable in Tibetan has a pitch that is an integral part of the pronunciation of that syllable. Pitch distinguishes one syllable from another. There are two to four tones, depending on dialect. Some dialects, particularly in the central region, have tones, but eastern and western dialects lack them. The Lhasa dialect has two tones: high and low. In monosyllabic words, the high tone can be pronounced with either a flat or a falling contour, while the low tone can be pronounced with either a flat or rising-falling contour.

Consonants

Tibetan makes a distinction between plain and aspirated obstruents, marked in the table below by the superscript /h/.
There is no contrast between voiced and voiceless obstruents.
Tibetan has retroflex consonants produced with the back of the tongue against the palate.
There is a contrast between a voiced /l/ and and a voiceless //.

xxx	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Alveolar	Alveo-palatal	Retroflex	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p - p	xx	t - t	c - c	x	k - k	?
Fricatives	xxxx	x	s			.	h
Affricates	xxcxx	xxxx	ts - ts	t - t	t - t	xx	x
Nasals	m	xxxx	n	xx	xxx		x
Approximant	qxxx	xxxx	xxx	xxx	x	xx	x
Lateral approximant	xxxxx	xxxx	l -	xxx	xxxx	xx	x
Semi-vowel	w	xx	r	xxx	xx	xx	x

?	similar to the glottal chatch in the English uh-uh
	similar to k in keen
ts	ts as in cats
, t	no equivalents in English
, t	no equivalents in English
	n as in canyon
	ng as in sing
	no equivalent in English

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of Tibetan syllables.

Grammar

Literary Tibetan and, to a lesser extent the spoken language, show some features of agglutinative morphology. In an agglutinative language, affixes, each one with its own meaning, are added one after another to an unchanged root to express grammatical relations.

Noun phrase
Tibetan nouns have the following features:

The classical written language has nine cases: absolutive (unmarked morphologically), genitive, instrumental, locative, allative, terminative, comitative, ablative, and elative. Particles are attached to entire noun phrases, not to individual nouns.
There are masculine and feminine markers for animate nouns. .
Plural can be optionally marked in count and collective nouns by different postpositional particles.
There is an indefinite and definite marker.
There are no classifiers, as in other Sino-Tibetan languages such as Chinese and Burmese.

Click here for more detailed information about Tibetan nouns.

Verb phrase

Verbs are not inflected for person or number.
There are four separate stems: present, past, future, and imperative. The future stem is not a true future, but expresses necessity or obligation. Stems are distinguished by vowel changes and/or suffixes and prefixes.
Tibetan verbs fall into two main classes: volitional verbs and non-volitional. Volitional verbs represent actions under the speaker's control, e.g., make, while non-volitional verbs represent processes not under the speaker's control, e.g., recover. Non-volitional verbs lack an imperative stem.
There is a complex system of honorific and polite verbal forms Thus, many verbs have a different form to express the superior status of the agent of the action.

Word order
The typical word order in Tibetan is Subject-Object-Verb.

Registers
There are three registers:

colloquial spoken language
formal spoken language
classical written language

Click here for an online Tibetan reference grammar.

Vocabulary

Tibetan is rich in Buddhist terms, but is lacking words for dealing with modern administration, politics, technology, and science. Tibetan spoken in the People's Republic of China has borrowed many words from Chinese.

Below are the Tibetan numerals 1-9 in transliteration.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
chig	nyi	sum	shi	nga	trug	dün	gyay	gu

Writing

Tibetan has been written in its own distinctive script since the 7th century. The script is derived from the Brahmi script of India and was originally developed to translate Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan. The Tibetan alphabet contains 30 consonants and 4 vowels. It is a syllabic alphabet, like many of the alphabets of India and South East Asia. Each consonant has an inherent vowel /a/ which can be suppressed or replaced with other vowels by using a variety of diacritical marks that can appear above or below the consonant. Syllables are separated by a dot.

The most widely used forms of Tibetan script are generally divided into "headed" ("white") and "headless" ("black").

In the "headed" script, each letter is written separately from the adjacent letters, except for diacritics. This script is used for publishing, religious texts. It is the easiest to read and the slowest to write.
In the "headless" script, letters flow into each other. It is typically used for handwritten documents. It is good for quick writing, but is more difficult to read.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights written in the Tibetan "headed" script.

Translation
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Tibetan words in English
Did you know that these English words came from Tibetan?

lama	'Buddhist priest of Mongolia or Tibet', from Tibetan blama 'chief, high priest', with silent [b-].
sherpa	from Tibetan, 'dweller in an eastern country'
yak	'wild ox of central Asia', from Tibetan g-yag 'male yak'
yeti	from Sherpa yeh-teh 'small manlike animal'

Resources

Click here to find out where Tibetan is taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Tibetan.

Online resources for the study of Tibetan
Yamada Language Center Guide for Tibetan
Omniglot Guide to Tibetan writing
The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library
Language Links - Tibetan
The Tibetan Language Student
Tibetan language
Tibetan calligraphy
Tibetan language learning resources
University of Michigan Tibetan Studies Resource