Lhasa Tibetan

Lhasa Tibetan
བོད་སྐད་
Native toLhasa
RegionTibet Autonomous Region, Ü-Tsang
Native speakers
(1.2 million cited 1990 census)[1]
Sino-Tibetan
  • Tibeto-Burman
    • Tibeto-Kanauri (?)
      • Bodish
        • Tibetic
          • Central Tibetan
            • Lhasa Tibetan
Early forms
Old Tibetan
  • Classical Tibetan
Official status
Official language in
China
Regulated byCommittee for the Standardisation of the Tibetan Language[note 1]
Language codes
ISO 639-1bo
ISO 639-2tib (B)
bod (T)
ISO 639-3bod
Glottologtibe1272
Linguasphere70-AAA-ac

Lhasa Tibetan[a][b] or Standard Tibetan[c] is a standardized dialect of Tibetan spoken by the people of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region.[2] It is an official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region.[3]

In the traditional "three-branched" classification of the Tibetic languages, the Lhasa dialect belongs to the Central Tibetan branch (the other two being Khams Tibetan and Amdo Tibetan).[4] In terms of mutual intelligibility, speakers of Khams Tibetan are able to communicate at a basic level with Lhasa Tibetan, while Amdo speakers cannot.[4] Both Lhasa Tibetan and Khams Tibetan evolved to become tonal and do not preserve the word-initial consonant clusters, which makes them very far from Classical Tibetan, especially when compared to the more conservative Amdo Tibetan.[5][6]

  1. ^ Lhasa Tibetan at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ DeLancey, Scott (2017). "Chapter 19: Lhasa Tibetan". In Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla (ed.). The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 2nd edition. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-367-57045-3.
  3. ^ "Fifty Years of Democratic Reform in Tibet". Official Chinese government site. 2009-03-02. Archived from the original on 2015-12-08. Retrieved 2010-10-16.
  4. ^ a b Gelek, Konchok (2017). "Variation, contact, and change in language: Varieties in Yul shul (northern Khams)". International Journal of the Sociology of Language (245): 91–92.
  5. ^ Makley, Charlene; Dede, Keith; Hua, Kan; Wang, Qingshan (1999). "The Amdo Dialect of Labrang" (PDF). Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. 22 (1): 101. doi:10.32655/LTBA.22.1.05. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-05.
  6. ^ Reynolds, Jermay J. (2012). Language variation and change in an Amdo Tibetan village: Gender, education and resistance (PDF) (PhD thesis). Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University. p. 19-21. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-08-12.


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