top of page

Dzongkha

Dzongkha

Summary

Dzongkha is natively spoken by around 171,000 people and is the official language of Bhutan. Belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family, Dzongkha is written using the Tibetan script, a traditional abugida system. Its grammar is agglutinative, with five cases and a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order. Deeply tied to Bhutan's Buddhist heritage, Dzongkha is used in government, education, and cultural ceremonies.

Stats

  • Language Family: Sino-Tibetan

  • Writing System: Tibetan

  • Writing System Type: Abugida

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: 2

  • Morphology: Agglutinative

  • Cases: 5

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: None

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 3

  • Word Order: SOV

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 13

  • Number of Consonants: 24

Areas Where Spoken

  • Bhutan (official) (23.5%) (171,000)

Resources

Culture

Dictionary

Lessons

YouTube Videos

YouTube Channels

Websites

bottom of page