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This page gives a list of English-language linguistics research on the Tibetan languages. It focuses mainly on open-access works that give a thorough overview of a given topic. I have included only two works for each topic to make it feel more approachable.
To view the articles you will need to make an Academia.edu account, which is free. I mainly use Academia.edu because it tends to have more full papers than other sites like ResearchGate or CORE.
Sections:
1. Proto-Tibetan and Old Tibetan
Overview
History of the Tibetan Language, by Tsuguhito Takeuchi (2021)
Formation and Transformation of Old Tibetan, by Tsuguhito Takeuchi (2013)
Historical phonology
An Inventory of Tibetan Sound Laws, by Nathan W. Hill (2011)
Reducing phonetical complexity and grammatical opaqueness: Old Tibetan as a lingua franca and the development of the modern Tibetan varieties, by Bettina Zeisler (2009)
Lexicography
Studies in the Lexis and Word-Formation of Old Tibetan, by Joanna Bialek (2015)
The lexicography of Tibetan, by Nathan Hill (2017)
Verbal morphology
Old Tibetan verb morphology and semantics: An attempt at a reconstruction, by Joanna Bialek (2020)
A functional reconstruction of the Proto-Tibetan verbal system, by Marius Zemp (2016)
Manuscripts and epigraphy
Fragments of the Testament of Ba from Dunhuang, by Sam van Schaik and Kazushi Iwao (2008)
Old Tibetan Inscriptions, edited by Kuzushi Iwao, Nathan W. Hill, and Tsuguhito Takeuchi (2009)
Paleography
Dating Early Tibetan Manuscripts: A Paleographical Method, by Sam van Schaik (2013)
Towards a Tibetan Palaeography: Developing a Typology of Writing Styles in Early Tibet, by Sam van Schaik (2014)
Methodology
Word families, allofams, and the comparative method, by Nathan W. Hill and Hannes A. Fellner (2019)
A brief response to Fellner and Hill’s “Word families, allofams, and the comparative method”, by Zev Handel (2019)
2. Middle Tibetan
Note: “Classical Tibetan” is the written form of Middle Tibetan.
Case marking in Classical Tibetan
The Classical Tibetan cases and their transcategoriality: From sacred grammar to modern linguistics, by Nicolas Tournadre (2010)
Tibetan -las, -nas and -bas, by Nathan W. Hill (2012)
Xylography and printing
Towards a History of Early Tibetan Printing: New Evidence and Uncharted Territories, by Marta Sernesi (2017)
Tibetan Printing: Comparison, Continuities, and Change, edited by Hildegard Diemberger, Karl Ehrhard, and Peter F. Kornicki (2016)
Studies on Tsangnyön Heruka’s Life of Milarepa
Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Middle Tibetan, by Guillaume Oisel (2014)
Clause-linkage and Clause Hierarchy in Middle Tibetan, by Guillaume Oisel (n.d.)
3. Modern Tibetan
Language families and phylogeny
The ancestry of Tibetan, by George van Driem (2013)
The Tibetic languages and their classification, by Nicolas Tournadre (2014)
The idea of “Standard Tibetan”
Language attitudes and identity in the Tibetan Dharamsala diaspora, by Jeff Robert Izzard (2015)
On the Yak Horns of a Dilemma: Diverging Standards in Diaspora Tibetan, by Dirk Schmidt (2022)
Dialectology
Tibetan dialects: a case study in areal phonology, by Dmitry Nikolaev (2015)
Review of ‘Bod kyi yul skad rnam bshad [General Introduction to the Tibetan Dialects]’ by Sum-bha Don-grub Tshe-ring [Sumbha Dondrub Tshering], by Nicolas Tournadre (2015)
Minoritization of Tibetan languages
Tibetan Language Rights and Civil Society in the People’s Republic of China: Challenges of and for Rights, by Gerald Roche (2020)
Minority, Language and Translation in Tibet, by Roberta Raine (2020)
Evidentiality
Evidentiality in Tibetic, by Scott DeLancey (2018)
Evidence for the development of ‘evidentiality’ as a grammatical category in Tibetan, by Bettina Zeisler (2014)
Mirativity
“Mirativity” does not exist: ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan and other suspects, by Nathan W. Hill (2012)
Still mirative after all these years, by Scott DeLancey (2012)
Ergativity
Tibetan Grammatical Categories and the Notion of ‘Ergativity’, by Ralf Vollmann (2008)
Descriptions of Tibetan ergativity: a historiographical account, by Ralf Vollmann (2008)
Auxiliary verbs
The function of auxiliary verbs in Tibetan predicates and their historical development, by Tsuguhito Takeuchi (1990)
The origins of verb serialization in Modern Tibetan, by Scott Delancey (1991)
4. Non-Tibetic languages
Tibet’s minority languages
(i.e., non-Tibetic languages within Tibet)
The Vitality of Tibet’s Minority Languages in the 21st Century-Preliminary Remarks, by Gerald Roche (2014)
Tibet’s Minority Languages: Diversity and Endangerment, by Gerald Roche (2018)
Lhasa sign language
Is Lhasa Tibetan Sign Language emerging, endangered, or both?, by Theresia Hofer (2017)
“Goat-Sheep-Mixed-Sign” in Lhasa – Deaf Tibetans’ language ideologies and unimodal codeswitching in Tibetan and Chinese sign languages, Tibet Autonomous Region, China, by Theresia Hofer (2020)
