Tibetan

Also known as Standard Tibetan, Lhasa Tibetan, Tibetan language

Tibeto-Burman language

AI overview

Tibetan is a language spoken primarily in the Tibetan plateau region of Asia and belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, which includes hundreds of other languages across the Himalayas and Southeast Asia. It matters because it serves as the primary language for millions of Tibetan people and carries significant cultural and religious importance in Tibetan Buddhist traditions and communities.

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Wikidata facts

Image: Standard Tibetan name.svg

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Commons category: Tibetan language
Wikimedia language code: bo
number of speakers, writers, or signers: 1200000
native label: བོད་སྐད
exact match: publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/language/BOD
P10369: Paris
P11012: Olmstead Luca
P13311: Lufingen

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Article

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.