Central Tibetan languages

The term "Central Tibetan" is sometimes restricted to the dBus language, or Central Tibetan proper: See Standard Tibetan.

Tibetan provinces

The Central Tibetan languages are the tonal varieties of Tibetan apart from Khams.

The composition of the Central Tibetan languages per Bradley (1997), with dialect information from the Tibetan Dialects Project at the University of Bern, is:

• Western ('Western Innovative Tibetan')
  • Dialects of Upper Ladakh and Zanskar, of the Northwest Indian Border Area (Lahul, Spiti, and Uttarakhand), and of Tholing (westernmost Tibet)
• Dbus aka Ü (alternate transcriptions of [y˧˥˧ʔ]; 'Central Tibetan' proper)
  • Most dialects of Ngari Prefecture in western Tibet, of the northern Nepalese border area in Nepal, Tsang Province dialects of Xigazê Prefecture, and Ü Province dialects (Lhokha, Lhasa, etc.), the basis of Standard Tibetan
• Northern
  • Dialects of Garzê,^{[dubious – discuss]} of Nagqu Prefecture in north-central Tibet, and of Nangqên in Southern Qinghai
• Southern
  • Tromowa dialect of Chumbi Valley in southern Tsang, dialects of Sikkim and of Bhutan

    Southern Central Tibetan is sometimes separated as a southern branch of all Tibetan languages, or even southern Bodish. Because many of southern varieties lie outside the political boundaries of China, they are often considered separate languages, which the other varieties of Central Tibetan are not, despite being mutually unintelligible. Southern languages include Dzongkha of Bhutan, Sherpa of Nepal, and Sikkimese.

References

• The Tibetan Dialects Project at the University of Bern

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Research on Tibetan Languages: A Bibliography

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