Standard Tibetan

Standard Tibetan
Lhasa Tibetan, or Standard Tibetan, is the Tibetan dialect spoken by educated people of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. It is an official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

In the traditional "three-branched" classification of Tibetic languages, the Lhasa dialect belongs to the Central Tibetan branch (the other two being Khams Tibetan and Amdo Tibetan). In terms of mutual intelligibility, speakers of Khams Tibetan are able to communicate at a basic level with Lhasa Tibetan, while Amdo speakers cannot. Both Lhasa Tibetan and Khams Tibetan evolved to become tonal and do not preserve the word-initial consonant clusters, which makes them very far from Classical Tibetan, especially when compared to the more conservative Amdo Tibetan.

Like many languages, Lhasa Tibetan has a variety of language registers:

* ཕལ་སྐད (Wylie: phal skad, literally "demotic language"): the vernacular speech.

* ཞེ་ས (Wylie: zhe sa, "honorifics or deference, courtesy"): the formal spoken style, particularly prominent in Lhasa.

* ཡིག་སྐད (Wylie: yig skad, literally "letters language" or "literary language"): the written literary style; may include ཆོས་སྐད chos skad below.

* ཆོས་སྐད (Wylie: chos skad, literally "doctrine language" or "religious language"): the literary style in which the scriptures and other classical works are written.