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Re: Bhutan's language(s) ?

From:John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Date:Thursday, October 28, 2004, 13:57
Rodlox scripsit:

> out of curiosity, what is the language(s) of Bhutan? and to which > languages(s) are it/they related? *curious*
Such questions as these are best answered at the Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com), which gives information on about 6500 languages, including where they are spoken and by approximately how many speakers, and gives a fairly conservative family tree. The relevant page for Bhutan is http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Bhutan , which shows that Dzhongkha, a Tibetan language, is the dominant and indeed the official language of the Kingdom. It is not closely related to (standard) Tibetan, since it belongs to the Southern Tibetan rather than the Central Tibetan group. ("Tibetan" is unfortunately the name of both a language and a language family.) A quick look shows that the other languages of Bhutan also belong to the Tibetan family, except for a few outliers from other branches of the Tibeto-Kanauri superfamily, and for Nepali, which is Indo-European. Nepali has almost as many speakers as Dzongkha, being the dominant language at lower elevations, particularly in the southern part of the country. -- A mosquito cried out in his pain, John Cowan "A chemist has poisoned my brain!" http://www.ccil.org/~cowan The cause of his sorrow http://www.reutershealth.com Was para-dichloro- jcowan@reutershealth.com Diphenyltrichloroethane. (aka DDT)