Khams Tibetan

Not to be confused with Kham language.
Khams Tibetan
Khams skad, Khamké
ཁམས་སྐད
RegionKhams (Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan in China)
Bhutan
Native speakers
2 million (2022)[1]
Tibetan script
Language codes
ISO 639-3Variously:
khg – Khams
kbg – Khamba
tsk – Tseku
Glottologkham1299
ELPKhamba
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Khams Tibetan (Tibetan: ཁམས་སྐད, Wylie: Khams skad, THL: Khamké) is the Tibetic language used by the majority of the people in Kham. Khams is one of the three branches of the traditional classification of Tibetic languages (the other two being Amdo Tibetan and Ü-Tsang).[2] In terms of mutual intelligibility, Khams could communicate at a basic level with the Ü-Tsang branch (including Lhasa Tibetan).[2]

Both Khams Tibetan and Lhasa Tibetan evolve to not preserve the word-initial consonant clusters,[3] which makes them very far from Classical Tibetan, especially when compared to the more conservative Amdo Tibetan.[4][5] Also, Kham and Lhasa Tibetan evolved to be tonal, which Classical Tibetan was not.[3] Khams Tibetan has 80% lexical similarity with Central Tibetan.[6]

  1. ^ Khams at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Khamba at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Tseku at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ a b Haller, Felix (1999). "A bref comparison of register tone in central tibetan and kham tibetan" (PDF). Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. 22 (2). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-06-16.
  4. ^ 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.
  5. ^ 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.
  6. ^ "China". Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Nineteenth Edition. 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-09-09. Retrieved 2023-04-10.