Re: Bhutan's language(s) ?

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)