top of page

Tibetan

Tibetan

Summary

Tibetan, spoken by about 1.2 million people, is used primarily in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Belonging to the Sino-Tibetan family, it uses the Tibetan script, an abugida. With agglutinative grammar, six cases, and SOV word order, Tibetan is deeply tied to Buddhist rituals, scriptures, and cultural identity, playing a crucial role in spiritual and scholarly traditions. (Standard/Lhasa Tibetan was used as our grammatical reference).

Stats

  • Language Family: Sino-Tibetan

  • Writing System: Tibetan

  • Writing System Type: Abugida

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: 2

  • Morphology: Agglutinative

  • Cases: 6

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: None

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 4

  • Word Order: SOV

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 8

  • Number of Consonants: 29

Areas Where Spoken

  • China (0.09%) (~1.2 million)

Resources

bottom of page