News Weather Horoscopes E-mail Visit our sponsors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It is spoken by 5 million people in the Tibet autonomous region and the Qinghai and Gansu provinces of China and in Bhutan, Nepal, the Indian state of Sikkim, and part of Kashmir. There are a number of dialects. Tibetan tends to be monosyllabic and to lack inflection.
Word order is, therefore, very important.
A system of writing that is a syllabary was devised for Tibetan in the 7th cent. A.D. and is derived ultimately from the northern Gupta alphabet of India, which, in turn, is a descendant of a Semitic script. Tibetan is written from left to right. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.