Standard Tibetan

The “standard” form of a language is the sociopolitically dominant form that’s used in education, government, and other official contexts. It carries social prestige and is upheld as the ideal form of the language. The term “Standard Tibetan” has typically been used to refer to the language spoken in Lhasa — the capital of historical Tibet and present-day Tibet Autonomous Region — by the educated upper-middle class.

Usually it is those who hold sociopolitical power whose speech is upheld as the standard, whereas deviation from their speech is criticized and discouraged. Speakers of non-standard forms of the language are often subject to linguistic discrimination, and may be pressured to adopt the standard form to fit in.

These norms, however, are socially constructed and arbitrary. There is nothing that makes one form of a language “standard” other than people treating it as such, and subsequently codifying this bias in education and culture. This process is called standardization. The use of the term “Standard Tibetan” in this course should therefore be understood as descriptive, and not normative. The idea that a certain language variety is “standard” is a reflection of people’s social beliefs and behaviours, and is not an inherent feature of that language variety.

Tibet was invaded and annexed by China in the 1950s. Tibetan accounts of the invasion have been recorded and made available online through the Tibet Oral History Project. Since the invasion, many Tibetan people have fled Tibet and established refugee communities around the world. Tibetan people living outside of Tibet are collectively referred to as the Tibetan diaspora. At present, the largest Tibetan diaspora communities are རྡ་ས་ Dharamshala and སྦེལ་ཀོབ་ Bylakuppe, both in India.

The upper-middle class speech of Lhasa has retained its cultural prestige even in the diaspora. However, with more than 70 years of geographic separation from Lhasa, the language of the diaspora has started to develop its own unique features. Recent research has shown that the standard speech of the diaspora has diverged slightly from the speech of Lhasa, so we now need to distinguish between Lhasa Tibetan and Standard Diaspora Tibetan.

Nevertheless, Lhasa Tibetan and Standard Diaspora Tibetan are still extremely similar. Learning one will allow you to understand the other, so we can say that they are mutually intelligible varieties of Tibetan. They have only minor differences in pronunciation and grammar.

This course focuses on Standard Diaspora Tibetan because it is the form that I have learned from my teachers, and because it is the form of Tibetan that people outside of Tibet will usually encounter the most often.

Tibetan is diglossic (di– = “two”, gloss = “languages”), which means that the spoken form of the language and the written form of the language are quite different. The spoken and written languages use different vocabulary and grammar, and it usually sounds strange to mix them up.

This course focuses on the spoken language, which will allow you to talk to people in Tibetan. It discusses certain aspects of the written language, but not in detail. I may add more content for the written language later on.

All languages change gradually over time, and Tibetan is no exception. The Tibetan language was first written down in the 7th century CE, and it has changed a lot since then in terms of its vocabulary, its grammar, and its pronunciation. The oldest recorded phase of the language is called “Old Tibetan”, and the phase of the language beginning around the 11th century is called “Middle Tibetan”. This course teaches “Modern Tibetan”, the current form of the language as it exists in the 21st century.

Note: The modern, spoken form of a language is often called the colloquial language, whereas the older, written form of a language is often called the classical language. I intentionally avoid these terms because I want to disentangle a language’s age from its communicative medium. “Classical Tibetan” is just the written form of Middle Tibetan, and “Colloquial Tibetan” is just the spoken form of Modern Tibetan.

The speech of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, has received the most attention in English-language resources and is sometimes erroneously equated with “the Tibetan language” as a whole. The dialect taught in this course, Standard Diaspora Tibetan, is closely related to Lhasa Tibetan and is widely used across the Tibetan diaspora. However, there are many other Tibetan dialects than just these two.

Tibet is divided into three main geographical regions — Ütsang, Kham, and Amdo — which are each home to a range of Tibetan dialects. In popular consciousness, the dialects of each region are sometimes erroneously reduced to the speech of a single city or town, such as Lhasa (in Ütsang), Derge (in Kham), and Rebkong (in Amdo). In reality, there are dozens of different Tibetan dialects, most of which remain poorly documented and at risk of extinction. The world’s indigenous languages are currently dying off at an unprecedented rate due colonialism, authoritarian language policies, and the rise of regional lingua francas.

If you are a native speaker of any underrepresented Tibetan dialect, and if you would like to help create a course on it for this site, please feel free to reach out. No previous knowledge of linguistics is needed. Also, if you are a native speaker of any Tibetan dialect who studies linguistics and would like to help other native speakers create courses, then please feel free to reach out as well. Native speakers of related languages that are not ethnically Tibetan (e.g. Balti) are also welcome to reach out.

Yes. I highly recommend any of the following online books:

• Colloquial Tibetan
  • audio available here
• Manual of Standard Tibetan
  • you need to make a free archive.org account to access this
  • audio available here
• Introduction to the Tibetan Language
  • you need to download a multimedia epub reader to access this
  • audio and video is incorporated into the epub by default

To find a Tibetan teacher, I recommend using the Tibetan Lessons list curated by Esukhia.

This course is for anyone who wants to learn Standard Diaspora Tibetan. This course is designed to be accessible to ordinary people.

My motivation for creating this website is that there are currently no other websites that explicitly teach Tibetan grammar in a thorough way and for free. Learners are mostly limited to books which are hard to access, cannot be updated, and are not indexed or searchable online. The few websites and videos that do teach Tibetan grammar for free do not go beyond basic grammar. This website aims to address all of these gaps. This website may be particularly useful for people who are learning the language without any explicit grammar instruction from their teachers.

I’ve tried to walk a very delicate line between 1) being accessible, 2) being informative and precise, and 3) conforming to standard linguistic terms.

In order to be informative and precise, I have not shied away from using technical vocabulary when it’s useful for identifying a particular aspect of the grammar. In order to be accessible, whenever I use some technical term for the first time, I define it. Definitions of newly introduced grammatical terms are included at the bottom of each unit.

I have tried to conform to standard linguistic terms both to communicate clearly to people who already know this terminology (e.g. language learning enthusiasts, linguists), and in order to help educate the reader so that they are better able to read and understand academic research on the Tibetan language.

For the sake of accessibility, I have tried to only use grammatical terms that have a relatively transparent connection to their meaning, such as tone or quantifier. I have intentionally avoided terms and distinctions that would bring relatively little benefit, such as differentiating between phonology vs. phonetics, or allomorphs vs. different inflected forms, and so on.

I also have created a few technical terms in this course in order to name and describe certain aspects of Tibetan grammar in plain language. I have done this particularly for grammatical points that I’ve felt have been overlooked, underemphasized, or not discussed in plain language in other resources. This includes my discussion of “written-style speech” and so on in unit 4, my use of the catch-all term “alternate form” beginning in unit 5, and my discussion of the different “ears” of postpositions in unit 7.

They are Tibetan letters written in ཧོར་ཡིག་ horyik script. English often uses the alphabet to count things (e.g. section A, section B, section C, etc.), and Tibetan does the same with the Tibetan alphabet: ཀ་ for “first”, ཁ་ for “second”, ག་ for “third”, and so on. The horizontal black lines at the end of a unit are ཤད་ shä marks, used in Tibetan for marking the end of a string of text. I’ve included all these symbols for visual appeal, and also because they help you find different sections easily if you’re scrolling quickly through a page.

The site logo is also written in horyik script. It consists of the first letter of the Tibetan alphabet (ཀ་ ka) written on top of the last letter (ཨ་ a). This symbolizes a thorough treatment of the Tibetan language, from the basics up to advanced topics. It also represents language in general, because the union of consonant letters (ཀཱ་ལི་ kāli) and vowel letters (ཨཱ་ལི་ āli) is the basis of all language.

As is said in the classic text of Tibetan grammar, The Thirty:

There’s no specific forum for this website, but there are Tibetan language forums on Reddit and Discord.

Please contact me about it!

Please contact me and include what type of device you’re accessing it on (phone, tablet, computer), the model (e.g. Samsung Galaxy A22, iPhone 12, etc.) and the operating system (Android, iOS, etc.). Certain issues have to do with the width of the screen, which depends on the device type and model, and other issues have to do with the font options on a particular operating system.

Note: I’m aware that some of the audio doesn’t work on mobile. I’m working on figuring out why and hopefully finding a solution.