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Lhasa Tibetan or Standard Tibetan is a standardized dialect of Tibetan spoken by the people of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. It is an official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
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). In terms of mutual intelligibility, speakers of Khams Tibetan are able to communicate at a basic level with Lhasa Tibetan, while Amdo speakers cannot. 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.
Tibetan has been described as having six cases: Absolutive case, Ergative case, Genitive case, Ablative case, Comitative case and Oblique case. These are generally marked by particles, which are attached to entire noun phrases, rather than individual nouns. These suffixes may vary in form based on the final sound of the root.
Personal pronouns are inflected for number, showing singular, dual and plural forms. They can have between one and three registers.
The Standard Tibetan language distinguishes three levels of demonstrative: proximal "this", medial "that", and distal "that over there (yonder)". These can also take case suffixes.
Tibetan verbs can be divided into classes based on volition and valency. The volition of the verb has a major effect on its morphology and syntax. Volitional verbs have Imperative mood forms, whilst non-volitional verbs do not: compare "Look!" with the non-existent * "*See!". Additionally, only volitional verbs can take the Egophoricity copula .
Verbs in Tibetan can be split into monovalent and divalent verbs; some may also act as both, such as "break". This interacts with the volition of the verb to condition which nouns take the ergative case and which must take the absolutive case, remaining unmarked. Nonetheless, distinction in transitivity is orthogonal to volition; both the volitional and non-volitional classes contain transitive as well as intransitive verbs.
The aspect of the verb affects which verbal suffixes and which final auxiliary copulae are attached. Morphologically, verbs in the unaccomplished aspect are marked by the suffix or its other forms, identical to the genitive case for nouns, whereas accomplished aspect verbs do not use this suffix. Each can be broken down into two subcategories: under the unaccomplished aspect, future tense and progressive/general; under the accomplished aspect, perfect aspect and aorist aspect.
Evidentiality is a well-known feature of Tibetan verb morphology, gaining much scholarly attention, and contributing substantially to the understanding of evidentiality across languages. The evidentials in Standard Tibetan interact with aspect in a system marked by final copulae, with the following resultant modalities being a feature of Standard Tibetan, as classified by Nicolas Tournadre:
In scientific and astrological works, the numerals, as in Vedic Sanskrit, are expressed by symbolical words.
The written numerals are a variant of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, forming a base-10 positional counting system that is attested early on in Classical Tibetan texts.
Tibetan makes use of a special connector particle for the units above each multiple of ten. Between 100 and 199, the connective dang, literally "and", is used after the hundred portion. Above saya million, the numbers are treated as nouns and thus have their multiples following the word.
The numbers 1, 2, 3 and 10 change spelling when combined with other numerals, reflecting a change in pronunciation in combination.
Ordinal numbers are formed by adding a suffix to the cardinal number, ( -pa), with the exception of the ordinal number "first", which has its own lexeme, ( dang po).
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), while linguists tend to use other special transliteration systems of their own. As for transcriptions meant to approximate the pronunciation, Tibetan pinyin is the official romanization system employed by the government of the People's Republic of China, while English language materials use the THL transcription system. Certain names may also retain irregular transcriptions, such as Chomolungma for Mount Everest.
Tibetan orthographic syllable structure is (C1C2)C3(C4)V(C5C6) Not all combinations are licit.
| + !position !C1 !C2 !C3 !C4 !V !C5 !C6 |
The structure of a Lhasa Tibetan syllable is relatively simple; no consonant cluster is allowed and codas are only allowed with a single consonant. Vowels can be either short or long, and Vowel length may further be Nasal vowel. Vowel harmony is observed in two syllable words as well as verbs with a Finite verb ending.
Also, tones are Phoneme in this language, where at least two tonemes are distinguished. Although the four-tone analysis is favored by linguists in China, Scott DeLancey (2003) suggests that the falling tone and the final or are in contrastive distribution, describing Lhasa Tibetan syllables as either high or low.
| Consonant of Standard Tibetan ! ! colspan="2" | Bilabial ! colspan="2" | Alveolar ! Retroflex ! colspan="2" | (Alveolo-) Palatal ! colspan="2" | Velar consonant ! Glottal |
Tournadre and Sangda Dorje describe eight vowels in the standard language:
| Vowel of Standard Tibetan ! ! Front vowel !Central vowel ! Back vowel |
Three additional vowels are sometimes described as significantly distinct: or , which is normally an allophone of ; , which is normally an allophone of ; and (an unrounded, centralised, mid front vowel), 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 (foot) is pronounced and pad (borrowing from Sanskrit padma, Indian lotus) is pronounced , but the compound word, zhabs pad (lotus-foot, government minister) is pronounced . This process can result in involving sounds that are otherwise allophones.
Sources vary on whether the phone (resulting from in a closed syllable) and the phone (resulting from through the i-mutation) 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 (འི་), 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. These historically result from , , , , , and are reflected in the written language. The vowel quality of , and has shifted, since historical , along with all other coronal final consonants, caused a form of I-mutation in the Ü/Dbus branch of Central Tibetan. In some unusual cases, the vowels , , and may also be nasalised.
In polysyllabic words, tone mainly distinguishes meaning 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 the latter of which all syllables in a word can carry their own tone.
| V་ཡོད་ V- yod |
| V་ཡོད་པ་རེད་ V- yod-pa-red |
| V་བཞག་ V- bzhag |
Indian indology and linguist Rahul Sankrityayan wrote a Tibetan grammar in Hindi. Some of his other works on Tibetan were:
Japanese linguist Kitamura Hajime published a grammar and dictionary of Lhasa Tibetan in 1990.
In February 2008, Norman Baker, a British Member of Parliament, 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, Tibetology 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."
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