Preliminary notes on the languages of the Bumthang group (original) (raw)

1. The Bumthang languages Bhutan is home to perhaps a dozen Tibeto-Burman languages; the three major ones, from west to east, are Dzongkha, the official language, linguistically a Tibetan dialect, Bumthap, and Sharchop (or Tshangla). The main language of Central Bhutan, Bumthap, and its varieties or relatives may be referred to as the Bumthang group. This group is somewhat diverse. We will base our description on Kurtoep (Kt), the language of Dungkar and the Kurtoe ("upper Kuru Valley") region in Lhuntse district to the east of Bumthang, on which we collected data in Delhi in 1977-78. Bumthap proper (Bt) is the language of the four valleys of Bumthang district; we have a small amount of data, collected in Bhutan in 1986, on the dialects of Chume (Cm), Choekhor (Ck), and Ura (U) (the remaining valley is Tang). Kurtoep, Bumthap proper, and, by all reports, Khengke, to the south of Bumthang, are mutually intelligible. We have also included some preliminary material on a more divergent language, Mangdep 1 , from Tangbi village in Tongsa district (see map), which may also belong to the Bumthang group. The Bumthang languages are clearly closely related to Tibetan in addition to being heavily influenced by it, but we will show evidence that they are not Tibetan dialects, that is, unlike Dzongkha, they are not continuations of (roughly) the language reflected in the Tibetan writing system.