27°0′N 89°30′E / 27.000°N 89.500°E / 27.000; 89.500
18-500: Chukha District ( Dzongkha : ཆུ་ཁ་རྫོང་ཁག་; Wylie : Chu-kha rdzong-khag ; officially spelled "Chhukha" ) is one of the 20 dzongkhag (districts) comprising Bhutan . The major town is Phuentsholing . In Chukha, the main native languages are Dzongkha , the national language, and Nepali , spoken by the Lhotshampa in the south. The Bhutanese Lhokpu language , spoken by the Lhop minority,
36-544: A close linguistic relationship to J'umowa, which is spoken in the Chumbi Valley of Southern Tibet . It has a much more distant relationship to Standard Tibetan . Spoken Dzongkha and Tibetan are around 50% to 80% mutually intelligible, with the literary forms of both highly influenced by the liturgical (clerical) Classical Tibetan language, known in Bhutan as Chöke, which has been used for centuries by Buddhist monks . Chöke
54-611: A distinct set of rules." The following is a sample vocabulary: The following is a sample text in Dzongkha of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights : འགྲོ་ ’Gro- བ་ ba- མི་ mi- རིགས་ rigs- ག་ ga- ར་ ra- དབང་ dbaṅ- ཆ་ cha- འདྲ་ ’dra- མཏམ་ mtam- འབད་ ’bad- སྒྱེཝ་ sgyew- ལས་ las- ག་ ga- ར་ ra- གིས་ gis- གཅིག་ George van Driem George "Sjors" van Driem (born 1957)
72-841: A programme named Languages and Genes of the Greater Himalayan Region , conducted in collaboration with the Government of Nepal and the Royal Government of Bhutan, he collected DNA from many indigenous peoples of the Himalayas. In Bern, George van Driem currently runs the research programme Strategische Zielsetzungen im Subkontinent (Strategic Objectives in the Subcontinent), which aims to analyse and describe endangered and poorly documented languages in South Asia. This programme of research
90-458: A survey of the language communities of the kingdom. He and native Dzongkha speaker Karma Tshering co-authored the authoritative textbook on Dzongkha. Van Driem wrote grammars of Limbu and Dumi , Kiranti languages spoken in eastern Nepal, and the Bumthang language of central Bhutan. He authored Languages of the Himalayas, a two-volume ethnolinguistic handbook of the greater Himalayan region. Under
108-447: A transcription system known as Roman Dzongkha , devised by the linguist George van Driem , as its standard in 1991. Dzongkha is a tonal language and has two register tones: high and low. The tone of a syllable determines the allophone of the onset and the phonation type of the nuclear vowel. All consonants may begin a syllable. In the onsets of low-tone syllables, consonants are voiced . Aspirated consonants (indicated by
126-585: Is a South Tibetic language . It is closely related to Laya and Lunana and partially intelligible with Sikkimese , and to some other Bhutanese languages such as Chocha Ngacha , Brokpa , Brokkat and Lakha . It has a more distant relationship to Standard Tibetan . Spoken Dzongkha and Tibetan are around 50 to 80 percent mutually intelligible . Dzongkha and its dialects are the native tongue of eight western districts of Bhutan ( viz. Wangdue Phodrang , Punakha , Thimphu , Gasa , Paro , Ha , Dagana and Chukha ). There are also some native speakers near
144-490: Is a Dutch professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Bern . He studied East Asian languages and is known for the father tongue hypothesis . George van Driem has conducted field research in the Himalayas since 1983. He was commissioned by the Royal Government of Bhutan to codify a grammar of Dzongkha , the national language, design a phonological romanisation for the language known as Roman Dzongkha, and complete
162-543: Is also present in the southwest along the border with Samtse District . Chukha District is divided into eleven village blocks (or gewogs ): Chukha Dzongkhag covers 1,880 sq. km, but unlike most other districts, Chukha, along with Samtse , contain no protected areas of Bhutan . Although much of southern Bhutan contained protected areas in the 1960s, park-level environmental protection became untenable. Chukha contains Bhutan's oldest hydropower plant, Chukha hydel (completed in 1986–88), and Tala Hydroelectricity Project ,
180-535: Is effectively a diversification of the Himalayan Languages Project , which he directed at Leiden University, where he held the chair of Descriptive Linguistics until 2009. He and his research team have documented over a dozen endangered languages of the greater Himalayan region, producing analytical grammars and lexica and recording morphologically analysed native texts. His interdisciplinary research in collaboration with geneticists has led to advances in
198-471: Is often elided and results in the preceding vowel nasalized and prolonged, especially word-finally. Syllable-final /k/ is most often omitted when word-final as well, unless in formal speech. In literary pronunciation, liquids /r/ and /l/ may also end a syllable. Though rare, /ɕ/ is also found in syllable-final positions. No other consonants are found in syllable-final positions. Many words in Dzongkha are monosyllabic . Syllables usually take
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#1732859386802216-736: The Classroom (2019) are in Dzongkha. The Tibetan script used to write Dzongkha has thirty basic letters , sometimes known as "radicals", for consonants . Dzongkha is usually written in Bhutanese forms of the Uchen script , forms of the Tibetan script known as Jôyi "cursive longhand" and Jôtshum "formal longhand". The print form is known simply as Tshûm . There are various systems of romanization and transliteration for Dzongkha, but none accurately represents its phonetic sound. The Bhutanese government adopted
234-551: The Indian town of Kalimpong , once part of Bhutan but now in North Bengal , and in Sikkim . Dzongkha was declared the national language of Bhutan in 1971. Dzongkha study is mandatory in all schools, and the language is the lingua franca in the districts to the south and east where it is not the mother tongue. The Bhutanese films Travellers and Magicians (2003) and Lunana: A Yak in
252-500: The country's largest power plant. Dzongkha Dzongkha ( རྫོང་ཁ་ ; [d͡zòŋkʰɑ́] ) is a Tibeto-Burman language that is the official and national language of Bhutan . It is written using the Tibetan script . The word dzongkha means "the language of the fortress", from dzong "fortress" and kha "language". As of 2013 , Dzongkha had 171,080 native speakers and about 640,000 total speakers. Dzongkha
270-486: The form of CVC, CV, or VC. Syllables with complex onsets are also found, but such an onset must be a combination of an unaspirated bilabial stop and a palatal affricate. The bilabial stops in complex onsets are often omitted in colloquial speech. Dzongkha is considered a South Tibetic language . It is closely related to and partially intelligible with Sikkimese , and to some other Bhutanese languages such as Chocha Ngacha , Brokpa , Brokkat and Lakha . Dzongkha bears
288-596: The reconstruction of Asian ethnolinguistic prehistory. Based on linguistic palaeontology, ethnolinguistic phylogeography, rice genetics and the Holocene distribution of faunal species, he identified the ancient Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatics as the first domesticators of Asian rice and published a theory on the homelands and prehistoric dispersal of the Hmong-Mien , Austroasiatic and Trans-Himalayan linguistic phyla. His historical linguistic work on linguistic phylogeny has replaced
306-494: The superscript h ), /ɬ/ , and /h/ are not found in low-tone syllables. The rhotic /r/ is usually a trill [ r ] or a fricative trill [ r̝ ] , and is voiceless in the onsets of high-tone syllables. /t, tʰ, ts, tsʰ, s/ are dental . Descriptions of the palatal affricates and fricatives vary from alveolo-palatal to plain palatal. Only a few consonants are found in syllable-final positions. Most common among them are /m, n, p/ . Syllable-final /ŋ/
324-439: Was used as the language of education in Bhutan until the early 1960s when it was replaced by Dzongkha in public schools. Although descended from Classical Tibetan, Dzongkha shows a great many irregularities in sound changes that make the official spelling and standard pronunciation more distant from each other than is the case with Standard Tibetan. "Traditional orthography and modern phonology are two distinct systems operating by
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