Amdo Tibetan

Amdolese
ཨ་མདོའི་སྐད།, A-mdo’i skad
Native toChina
RegionAmdo (include Qinghai, Gansu, Tibet Autonomous Region and Sichuan)
Native speakers
1.8 million (2005)[1]
Tibetan script
Language codes
ISO 639-3adx
Glottologamdo1237
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Amdo Tibetan (Tibetan script: ཨ་མདོའི་སྐད་, Wylie: A-mdo’i skad, Lhasa dialect: [ámtokɛ́ʔ]; also called Am kä) is the Tibetic language spoken in Amdo (now mostly in Qinghai, some in Ngawa and Gannan). It has two varieties, the farmer dialects and the nomad dialects.[2]

Amdo is one of the three branches of traditional classification of Tibetic languages (the other two being Khams Tibetan and Ü-Tsang).[3] In terms of mutual intelligibility, Amdo speakers cannot communicate even at a basic level with the Ü-Tsang branch (including Lhasa Tibetan).[3]

Amdo Tibetan has 70% lexical similarity with Central Tibetan and Khams Tibetan.[4]

The nomad dialect of Amdo Tibetan is closer to classical written Tibetan as it preserves the word-initial consonant clusters and it is non-tonal, both now elided in the Ü-Tsang branch (including Lhasa Tibetan). Hence, its conservatism in phonology has become a source of pride among Amdo Tibetans.[5][2]

Amdo is one of the Tibetic languages that have undergone a spelling reform to make the written form closer to the spoken language: Guŋthaŋpa Dkonmchog Bstanpa˛i Sgronme (1762–1823) wrote "the Profound Dharma given in the vernacular so as to be well understood by all people of weak intellect" in the early 19th century using the vernacular of the time.[6] Modern Amdo works have continued the use of vernacular-based orthography: the 2007 novel Joys and Sorrows of the Nagtsang Boy, originally "written in kha skad", was translated to literary Tibetan and published in India in 2008.[7]

  1. ^ Amdolese at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ a b Reynolds, Jermay J. (2012). Language variation and change in an Amdo Tibetan village: Gender, education and resistance (PDF) (PhD thesis). Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University. p. 19-21. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-08-12.
  3. ^ a b Gelek, Konchok (2017). "Variation, contact, and change in language: Varieties in Yul shul (northern Khams)". International Journal of the Sociology of Language (245): 91–92.
  4. ^ "China". Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Nineteenth Edition. 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-09-09.
  5. ^ Makley, Charlene; Dede, Keith; Hua, Kan; Wang, Qingshan (1999). "The Amdo Dialect of Labrang" (PDF). Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. 22 (1): 101. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-05.
  6. ^ Zeisler, Bettina (2006). "Why Ladakhi must not be written – Being part of the Great Tradition Another kind of global thinking". In Anju Saxena; Lars Borin (eds.). Lesser-Known Languages of South Asia. p. 178.
  7. ^ de Heering, Xénia (June 2014). Breaching and Bridging Literary Traditions? A Few Observations about a Text “Written in kha skad” and Its Translation into Literary Tibetan. The 6th international Conference “issues of far eastern literatures” Panel - Modernizing the Tibetan Literary tradition. p. 8.