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]

  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.