Overview
Speakers of Tibetan live in a large area of western East Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau, and in Baltistan, Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan in northern Indian subcontinent. Classical Tibetan is the main written language of the region, especially in Buddhist scriptures.
The Tibetan-speaking population is approximately 8 million. With the global spread of Tibetan Buddhism, the Tibetan language has spread to the Western world, with some Westerners learning the language to translate many Buddhist scriptures and Tibetan literature. Outside of Lhasa, the Lhasa dialect is spoken by about 200,000 people who have fled Tibet for other parts of India. Tibetan is also spoken by a small group of ethnic minorities who have lived in close proximity to the Tibetan nationality for centuries, but have maintained their own language and culture.
Although the government of China has ethnically included the Qiang nationality of the Kham region within the Tibetan nationality, the Qiang is not a Tibetan and forms its own language group within the Sino-Tibetan languages.
Classical Tibetan does not have tones, but has developed tones in language variants such as Wu Tsang Tibetan and Kam Tibetan. Amdo Tibetan and Ladakhi/Bharti do not have a tone of voice. The morphology of the Tibetan languages generally belongs to agglutinative languages.
