The rhotic /r/ is usually a trill or a fricative trill, and is voiceless in the onsets of high-tone syllables. Aspirated consonants (indicated by the superscript h), /ɬ/, and /h/ are not found in low-tone syllables. In the onsets of low-tone syllables, consonants are voiced. Consonants ConsonantphonemesĪll consonants may begin a syllable.

The tone of a syllable determines the allophone of the onset and the phonation type of the nuclear vowel. Phonology Tonesĭzongkha is a tonal language and has two level tones (high and low ), and two contour tone distinctions, totaling four tones. The Bhutanese government adopted a transcription system known as Roman Dzongkha, devised by the linguist George van Driem, as its standard in 1991. There are various systems of romanization and transliteration for Dzongkha, but none accurately represents its phonetic sound. 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 Tibetan script used to write Dzongkha has thirty basic letters, sometimes known as 'radicals', for consonants. The word 'Dzongkha' in Jôyi, a Bhutanese form of the Uchen script The Bhutanese films Travellers and Magicians (2003) and Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2019) are in Dzongkha.

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. There are also some native speakers near the Indian town of Kalimpong, once part of Bhutan but now in North Bengal and in Sikkim.ĭzongkha was declared the national language of Bhutan in 1971. Usageĭzongkha and its dialects are the native tongue of eight western districts of Bhutan ( viz.Wangdue Phodrang, Punakha, Thimphu, Gasa, Paro, Ha, Dagana and Chukha). As of 2013, Dzongkha had 171,080 native speakers and about 640,000 total speakers. The word dzongkha means 'the language of the fortress', from dzong 'fortress' and kha 'language'. Jakar Dzong, representative of the distinct dzong architecture from which Dzongkha gets its nameĭzongkha ( རྫོང་ཁ་ ) is a Sino-Tibetan language that is the official and national language of Bhutan.

Dzongkha english dictionary pdf