Standard Tibetan


Standard Tibetan is a widely spoken form of the Tibetic languages that has many commonalities with the speech of Lhasa, an Ü-Tsang dialect. For this reason, Standard Tibetan is often called Lhasa Tibetan. Tibetan is an official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. The written language is based on Classical Tibetan and is highly conservative.

Registers

Like many languages, Standard Tibetan has a variety of language registers:

Syntax and word order

Tibetan is an ergative language. Grammatical constituents broadly have head-final word order:
Unlike many other languages of East Asia and especially Chinese, another Sino-Tibetan language, 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, sometimes after a smaller number.
In scientific and astrological works, the numerals, as in Vedic Sanskrit, are expressed by symbolical words.
Tibetan Numerals
Hindu numerals०१२३४५६७८९
Arabic numerals0123456789

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. It is also helpful in reconstructing Proto Sino-Tibetan and Old Chinese.
Wylie transliteration is the most common system of romanization used by Western scholars in rendering written Tibetan using the Latin alphabet. Tibetan pinyin, however, is the official romanization system employed by the government of the People's Republic of China. Certain names may also retain irregular transcriptions, such as Chomolungma for Mount Everest.

Phonology of modern Lhasa Tibetan

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

Vowels

Tournadre and Sangda Dorje describe eight vowels in the standard language:
FrontBack
Close
Close-mid
Open-mid
Open

Three additional vowels are sometimes described as significantly distinct: or, which is normally an allophone of ;, which is normally an allophone of ; and , which is normally an allophone of. These sounds normally occur in closed syllables; because Tibetan does not allow geminated consonants, there are cases in which one syllable ends with the same sound as the one following it. The result is that the first is pronounced as an open syllable but retains the vowel typical of a closed syllable. For instance, zhabs is pronounced and pad is pronounced, but the compound word, zhabs pad is pronounced. This process can result in minimal pairs involving sounds that are otherwise allophones.
Sources vary on whether the phone and the phone are distinct or basically identical.
Phonemic vowel length exists in Lhasa Tibetan but in a restricted set of circumstances. Assimilation of Classical Tibetan's suffixes, normally ‘i, at the end of a word produces a long vowel in Lhasa Tibetan; the feature is sometimes omitted in phonetic transcriptions. In normal spoken pronunciation, a lengthening of the vowel is also frequently substituted for the sounds and when they occur at the end of a syllable.
The vowels,,,, and each have nasalized forms:,,,, and, respectively, which historically results from,, etc. In some unusual cases, the vowels,, and 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, and 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 that differ only because of contour. The difference occurs only in certain words ending in the sounds or ; for instance, the word kham is pronounced with a high flat tone, whereas the word Khams is pronounced with a high falling tone.
In polysyllabic words, tone is not important except in the first syllable. This means that from the point of view of phonological typology, Tibetan could more accurately be described as a pitch-accent language than a true tone language, in which all syllables in a word can carry their own tone.

Consonants

The unaspirated stops,,, and typically become voiced in the low tone and are pronounced,,, and, respectively. The sounds are regarded as allophones. Similarly, the aspirated stops,,, and are typically lightly aspirated in the low tone. The dialect of the upper social strata in Lhasa does not use voiced stops in the low tone.
  1. The alveolar trill is in complementary distribution of the alveolar approximant ; therefore, both are treated as one phoneme.
  2. The voiceless alveolar lateral approximant resembles the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative found in languages such as Welsh and Zulu and is sometimes transcribed.
  3. The consonants,,,,, and may appear in syllable-final positions. The Classical Tibetan final is still present, but its modern pronunciation is normally realized as a nasalisation of the preceding vowel, rather than as a discrete consonant. However, is not pronounced in the final position of a word except in very formal speech. Also, syllable-final and are often not clearly pronounced but realized as a lengthening of the preceding vowel. The phonemic glottal stop appears only at the end of words in the place of,, or, which were pronounced in Classical Tibetan but have since been elided. For instance, the word for Tibet itself was Bod in Classical Tibetan but is now pronounced in the Lhasa dialect.

    Verbal system

The standard Tibetan verbal system distinguishes four tenses and three evidential moods.
FuturePresentPastPerfect
PersonalV-gi-yinV-gi-yodV-pa-yin / byuṅV-yod
FactualV-gi-redV-gi-yod-pa-redV-pa-redV-yod-pa-red
Testimonial-------V-gi-ḥdugV-soṅV-bźag

The three moods may all occur with all three grammatical persons, though early descriptions associated the personal modal category with European first-person agreement.

Counting system

Standard Tibetan has a base-10 counting system. The basic units of the counting system of Standard Tibetan is given in the table below in both the Tibetan script and a Romanisation for those unfamiliar with Written Tibetan.
Written
Tibetan		Tibetan
Arabic
numerals		Written
Tibetan		Tibetan
Arabic
numerals		Written
Tibetan		Tibetan
Arabic
numerals
་chig1nyishu tsa ji21zhi kya400
nyi2nyishu tsa nyi22nyi kya500
sum3nyishu tsa sum23drug kya600
zhi4nyishu tsa zhi24dün kya700
nga5nyishu tsa nga25kyed kya800
drug6nyishu tsa drug26ku kya900
dün7nyishu tsa dün27chig tong1000
gyed8nyishu tsa gyed28ཁྲིkhri10,000
gu9nyishu tsa gu29
chu10sum cu30sum cu so chig31
chugchig11ship cu40ship cu she chig41
chunyi12ngap cu50ngap cu nga chig51
choksum13trug cu60trug cu re chig61
chushi14dün cu70dün cu dhon chig71
chonga15gyed cu80gyed cu gya chig81
chudrug16gup cu90gup cu go chig91
chubdun17kya100kya tang chig101
chobgyed18kya tang ngap cu150
chudgu19nyi kya200
nyishu20sum kya300
འབུམbum100,000
ས་ཡsaya1,000,000
བྱེ་བche wa10,000,000
དུང་ཕྱུརtung chur100,000,000
ཐེར་འབུམter bum1,000,000,000

Scholarship

In the 18th and 19th centuries several Western linguists arrived in Tibet:
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, 1933
  3. Tibbati Vyakaran, 1933
  4. Tibbat May Budh Dharm, 1948
In much of Tibet, primary education is conducted either primarily or entirely in the Tibetan language, and bilingual education is rarely introduced before students reach middle school. However, Chinese is the language of instruction of most Tibetan secondary schools. In April 2020, classroom instruction was switched from Tibetan to Mandarin Chinese in Ngaba, Sichuan. Students who continue on to tertiary education have the option of studying humanistic disciplines in Tibetan at a number of minority colleges in China. That contrasts with Tibetan schools in Dharamsala, India, where the Ministry of Human Resource Development curriculum requires academic subjects to be taught in English from middle school. Literacy and enrollment rates continue to be the main concern of the Chinese government. Much of the adult population in Tibet remains illiterate, and despite compulsory education policies, many parents in rural areas are unable to send their children to school.
In February 2008, Norman Baker, a UK MP, released a statement to mark International Mother Language Day claiming, "The Chinese government are following a deliberate policy of extinguishing all that is Tibetan, including their own language in their own country" and he asserted a right for Tibetans to express themselves "in their mother tongue". However, Tibetologist Elliot Sperling has noted that "within certain limits the PRC does make efforts to accommodate Tibetan cultural expression" and "the cultural activity taking place all over the Tibetan plateau cannot be ignored."
Some scholars also question such claims because most Tibetans continue to reside in rural areas where Chinese is rarely spoken, as opposed to Lhasa and other Tibetan cities where Chinese can often be heard. In the Texas Journal of International Law, Barry Sautman stated that "none of the many recent studies of endangered languages deems Tibetan to be imperiled, and language maintenance among Tibetans contrasts with language loss even in the remote areas of Western states renowned for liberal policies... claims that primary schools in Tibet teach Mandarin are in error. Tibetan was the main language of instruction in 98% of TAR primary schools in 1996; today, Mandarin is introduced in early grades only in urban schools.... Because less than four out of ten TAR Tibetans reach secondary school, primary school matters most for their cultural formation."
Recently, the Yushul Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture Intermediate People's Court sentenced Tashi Wangchuk to five years in prison on 22 May 2018. Part of the evidence used in court was a New York Times video entitled, "Tashi Wangchuk: A Tibetan’s Journey for Justice" by Jonah M. Kessel. The accompanying text states, "To his surprise, he could not find one, even though nearly everyone living in this market town on the Tibetan plateau here is Tibetan. Officials had also ordered other monasteries and a private school in the area not to teach the language to laypeople. And public schools had dropped true bilingual education in Chinese and Tibetan, teaching Tibetan only in a single class, like a foreign language, if they taught it at all. 'This directly harms the culture of Tibetans,' said Mr. Tashi, 30, a shopkeeper who is trying to file a lawsuit to compel the authorities to provide more Tibetan education. 'Our people’s culture is fading and being wiped out.'"
The most important Tibetan branch of language under threat is, however, the Ladakhi language of the Western Tibetan group, in the Ladakh region of India. In Leh, a slow but gradual process is underway whereby the Tibetan vernacular is being supplanted by English and Hindi, and there are signs of a gradual loss of Tibetan cultural identity in the area. The adjacent Balti language is also in severe danger, and unlike Ladakhi, it has already been replaced by Urdu as the main language of Baltistan, particularly due to settlers speaking Urdu from other areas moving to that area.

Machine translation software and applications

An incomplete list of machine translation software or applications that can translate Tibetan language from/to a variety of other languages.