Dzongkha

Which languages are nearest to Dzongkha

It is close to Laya and Lunana and to J'umowa of the Chumbi Valley in southern Tibet, and partly intelligible with Sikkimese. Standard Tibetan is further off: spoken Dzongkha and Tibetan are 50 to 80% mutually intelligible. Both written forms owe much to Classical Tibetan, known in Bhutan as Chöke, which monks have used for centuries.

How Dzongkha took over from Chöke

Until the early 1960s Chöke was the language of education in Bhutan; then Dzongkha replaced it in public schools. The 1971 declaration followed. Dzongkha study is now compulsory in all schools. It is the mother tongue of eight western districts, among them Thimphu, Paro and Punakha, and a lingua franca in the south and east, where other languages are native. Some native speakers also live near Kalimpong, in North Bengal, and in Sikkim.

Why the spelling and the speech drift apart

Dzongkha descends from Classical Tibetan, but its sound changes are irregular, so official spelling and standard pronunciation sit further apart than they do in Standard Tibetan. One description calls traditional orthography and modern phonology two distinct systems with their own rules. The script has thirty basic consonant letters. In 1991 the government adopted Roman Dzongkha, a transcription devised by the linguist George van Driem, as its standard romanisation.

A syllable carries a high or a low tone, and in a low tone the vowel is breathy. Verbs mark tense, aspect and mood but never agree with person or number, and five different copulas translate the English verb to be.