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Standard Tibetan
བོད་སྐད་

bod skad
Spoken in Tibet
Total speakers between 5 and 10 million
Ranking 72
Language family Sino-Tibetan

• (Tibeto-Burman)
  • Tibeto-Kanauri
    • Bodish
      • Tibetan
        • Central Tibetan
          • Standard Tibetan

Official status
Official language in Tibet Autonomous Region
Regulated by Committee for the Standardisation of the Tibetan Language[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-1 bo
ISO 639-2 tib (B)  bod (T)
ISO 639-3 –
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Standard Tibetan, often called Central Tibetan (ü kä), in Tibetan script: བོད་སྐད་, is the official language of Tibet. It is based on the speech of Lhasa, an Ü-Tsang dialect of Dbus aka Ü, one of the Central Tibetan languages. Central Tibetan is in turn one of several branches of the Tibetan languages, the others being Khams (kham kä), Amdo (am kä), and Ladakhi (tö kä). The written language is based on Classical Tibetan and is highly conservative.

Registers

• Phal-skad: the vernacular speech.
• Zhe-sa ("polite respectful speech"): the formal spoken style, particularly prominent in Lhasa.
• Chos-skad ("religious language"): the literary style in which the scriptures and other classical works are written.

Grammar

Syntax and word order

• Tibetan is an ergative language. Grammatical constituents broadly have head-final word order:
  • adjectives generally follow nouns in Tibetan, unless the two are linked by a genitive particle
  • objects and adverbs precede the verb, as do adjectives in copular clauses
  • a noun marked with the genitive case precedes the noun which it modifies
  • demonstratives and numerals follow the noun they modify

Numerals

Unlike many other languages of East Asia, there are no numeral auxiliaries or measure words used in counting in Tibetan, although words expressive of a collective or integral are often used after the tens, and sometimes after a smaller number.

In scientific and astrological works, the numerals, as in Sanskrit, are expressed by symbolical words.

Writing system

Tibetan is written with an Indic script, with a historically conservative orthography that reflects Old Tibetan phonology and helps unify the Tibetan-language area.

Wylie transliteration is the most common system of romanization used by Western scholars in rendering written Tibetan using the Latin alphabet (such as employed on much of this page).

• Among the initials, five — ག g, ད d, བ b, མ m, འ ' — are regarded as prefixes, and are called so for all purposes, though they belong sometimes to the stem. As a rule, none of these letters can be placed before any of the same organic class. The language is much ruled by laws of euphony, which have been strictly formulated by native grammarians.

Phonology of modern Lhasa Tibetan

The following summarizes the sound system of the dialect of Tibetan spoken in Lhasa, which is the most influential variety of the spoken language

Vowels

Tournadre and Sangda Dorje describe eight vowels in the standard language:

  Front, unrounded Front, rounded Back, rounded
Close [i] [y] [u]
Close-mid [e] [ø] [o]
Open-mid [ɛ]
Open [a]

Three additional vowels are sometimes described as significantly distinct: [ʌ] or [ə], which is normally an allophone of [a]; [ɔ], which is normally an allophone of [o]; and [ɛ̈] (an unrounded, centralised, mid front vowel), which is normally an allophone of [e]. These sounds normally occur in closed syllables; because Tibetan does not allow geminated consonants, there are cases where one syllable ends with the same sound as the one following it, with the result that the first is pronounced as an open syllable but retains the vowel typical of a closed syllable. For instance, zhabs (foot) is pronounced [ɕʌp] and pad (contraction of padma, lotus) is pronounced [pɛʔ], but the compound word, zhabs pad is pronounced [ɕʌpɛʔ]. This process can result in minimal pairs between sounds that are otherwise allophones.

Sources vary on whether the [ɛ̈] phoneme (resulting from [e] in a closed syllable) and the [ɛ] phoneme (resulting from [a] through the i-mutation) are distinct or basically identical.

Phonemic vowel length exists in Lhasa Tibetan, but appears in a restricted set of circumstances. Assimilation of Classical Tibetan's suffixed vowels—normally ‘i (འི་)—at the end of a word produces a long vowel in Lhasa Tibetan; this feature is sometimes omitted in phonetic transcriptions. In normal spoken pronunciation, a lengthening of the vowel is also frequently substituted for the sounds [r] and [l] when they occur at the end of a syllable.

The vowels [i], [y], [e], [ø], and [ɛ] each have nasalized forms: [ĩ], [ỹ], [ẽ], [ø̃], and [ɛ̃], respectively. Historically, this results from a syllable-final /n/, such as /in/, /en/, etc. In some unusual cases, the vowels [a], [u], and [o] may also be nasalised.

Tones

The Lhasa dialect is usually described as having two tones: high and low. However, in monosyllabic words, each tone can occur with two distinct contours. 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, the latter being a tone that rises to a medium level before falling again. It is normally safe to distinguish only between the two tones, because there are very few minimal pairs which differ only because of contour. The difference only occurs in certain words ending in the sounds [m] or [ŋ]; for instance, the word kham (Tibetan: ཁམ་, "piece") is pronounced [kʰám] with a high flat tone, while the word Khams (Tibetan: ཁམས་, "the Kham region") is pronounced [kʰâm] with a high falling tone.

In polysyllabic words, tone is only important in the first syllable.

Consonants

ཀ क [ká] ཁ ख [kʰá] ག ग [ɡà/kʰà] ང ङ [ŋà]
ཅ च [tɕá] ཆ छ [tɕʰá] ཇ ज [dʑà/tɕʰà] ཉ ञ [ɲà]
ཏ त [tá] ཐ थ [tʰá] ད द [dà/tʰà] ན न [nà]
པ प [pá] ཕ फ [pʰá] བ ब [bà/pʰà] མ म [mà]
ཙ ष [tsá] ཚ tsha [tsʰá] ཛ dza [dzà/tsʰà] ཝ वa [wà]
ཞ झ [ʑà/ɕà] ཟ za [zà/sà] འ 'a [ɦà/ʔà] ཡ य [jà]
ར र [rà] ལ ल [là] ཤ श [ɕá] ས स [sá]
ཧ ह [há] ཨ अ [ʔá]
  Labial Alveolar Alveolo-palatal Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal
Nasal m n     ɲ ŋ  
Plosive aspirated pʰ tʰ   ʈʰ ~ ʈʂʰ cʰ kʰ  
unaspirated p t   ʈ ~ ʈʂ c k ʔ
Affricate aspirated   tsʰ tɕʰ        
unaspirated   ts tɕ        
Fricative   s ɕ ʂ     h
Approximant   ɹ     j w
Lateral voiceless   l̥          
voiced   l          

Notes:

• The unaspirated stops /p/, /t/, /c/, and /k/ typically become voiced in the low tone, being pronounced [b], [d], [ɟ], and [ɡ], respectively. These sounds are regarded as allophones. By a similar process, the aspirated stops [pʰ], [tʰ], [cʰ], and [kʰ] are typically lightly aspirated in the low tone. The dialect of upper social strata in Lhasa does not use voiced stops in the low tone.
• The alveolar trill ([r]) is in complementary distribution of the alveolar approximant [ɹ]; therefore, they are treated as one phoneme.
• The voiceless alveolar lateral approximant [l̥] resembles the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [ɬ] found in languages such as Welsh and Zulu and is sometimes transcribed as <ɬ>.
• The consonants /m/, /ŋ/, /p/, /r/, /l/, and /k/ may appear in syllable-final positions. The Classical Tibetan final /n/ is still present, but its modern pronunciation is normally realized as a nasalisation of the preceding vowel, rather than as a discrete consonant (see above). Note that /k/ is not pronounced in the final position of a word, except in highly formal speech. Also, syllable-final /r/ and /l/ are often not clearly pronounced, but instead realized as a lengthening of the preceding vowel. The phonemic glottal stop /ʔ/ appears only at the end of words in place of an /s/, /t/, or /k/ which were pronounced in Classical Tibetan but have since been elided. For instance, the word for Tibet itself was Bod in Classical Tibetan and is now pronounced [pʰø̀ʔ] in the Lhasa dialect.

Scholarship

Since at least around the 7th century when the Han Chinese came into contact with the Tibetans, phonetics and grammar of Tibetan have been systematically described and documented. Tibetans also developed scholarly analyses of their own language, mostly for purposes of translation, diplomacy with India and China, and religion (Tibetan Buddhism).

Indian Indologist and Linguist, Rahul Sankrityayan wrote a Tibetan grammar in Hindi. Some of his other works on Tibetan were:

1. Tibbati Bal-Siksha - 1933
2. Pathavali (Vol. 1,2 & 3) - 1933
3. Tibbati Vyakaran - 1933
4. Tibbat May Budh Dharm-1948

Western linguists who arrived at Tibet in the 18th and 19th centuries include: