Amdo Tibetan

Amdolese
Amdolese
ཨ་མདོའི་སྐད།, A-mdo’i skad
Native to	China
Region	Amdo (include Qinghai, Gansu, Tibet Autonomous Region and Sichuan)
Native speakers	2.5 million (2005)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman Tibeto-Kanauri (?) Bodish Tibetic Amdolese; ; ; ; ;
Writing system	Tibetan script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	adx
Glottolog	amdo1237
	This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

It has two varieties, the farmer dialects and the nomad dialects.

Amdo is one of the three branches of traditional classification of Tibetic languages (the other two being Khams Tibetan and Ü-Tsang). In terms of mutual intelligibility, Amdo speakers cannot communicate even at a basic level with the Ü-Tsang branch (including Lhasa Tibetan).

Amdo Tibetan has 70% lexical similarity with Central Tibetan and Khams Tibetan.

The nomad dialect of Amdo Tibetan is closer to classical written Tibetan as it preserves the word-initial consonant clusters and it is non-tonal, both now elided in the Ü-Tsang branch (including Lhasa Tibetan). Hence, its conservatism in phonology has become a source of pride among Amdo Tibetans.

Dialects

Dialects are:

North Kokonor (Kangtsa, Themchen, Arik, etc.)
West Kokonor (Dulan, Na'gormo, etc.),
Southeast Kokonor (Jainca, Thrika, Hualong, etc.)
Labrang (Labrang, Luchu)
Golok (Machen, Matö, Gabde)
Ngapa (Ngapa, Dzorge, Dzamthang)
Kandze

Bradley (1997) includes Thewo and Choni as close to Amdo if not actually Amdo dialects.

Mabzhi is a dialect belonging to the Kokonor group of Amdo Tibetan (Tsering Samdrup and Suzuki 2017).

mDungnag, a divergent Tibetan language spoken in Gansu, is not mutually intelligible with any of the Amdo dialects.

Hua (2001) contains word lists of the Xiahe County 夏河, Tongren County 同仁, Xunhua County 循化, Hualong County 化隆, Hongyuan County 红原, and Tianjun County 天峻 dialects of Amdo Tibetan in Gansu and Qinghai provinces.

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial	Alveolar		Retroflex	(Alveolo-) palatal	Velar	Uvular/ Glottal
		Labial	plain	sib.	Retroflex	(Alveolo-) palatal	Velar	plain	lab.
Nasal		m	n			ɲ	ŋ
Plosive/ Affricate	plain	p	t	ts	ʈ	tɕ	k
	aspirated	pʰ	tʰ	tsʰ	ʈʰ	tɕʰ	kʰ
	voiced	b	d	dz	ɖ	dʑ	ɡ
Fricative	plain			s	ʂ	ɕ	x	h	hʷ
	voiced			z	ʐ	ʑ		ʁ	ʁʷ
	aspirated			sʰ
Semivowel		w				j
Lateral	voiceless		ɬ
Lateral	voiced		l

Retroflex stop sounds /ʈ, ʈʰ, ɖ/ may also be pronounced as affricate sounds [ʈʂ, ʈʂʰ, ɖʐ] in free variation.
Voiced consonants are often heard as pre-breathy-voiced (i.e. /d/ [ʱd]) among different dialects.
/ʐ/, typically written phonemically as /r/, can be heard as an alveolar flap [ɾ] in word-medial positions.
/x/ may also be heard as a palatal [ç] in free variation.
Labio-dental fricatives /f/ and /v/ may also occur in words of foreign origin.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Mid	e	ə	o
Open	a

Amdo Tibetan typically has a four-vowel system as /e, ə, a, o/, as all close vowels [i, ɨ, u] have merged to one vowel /ə/. However, when there is a consonant sound within the coda position, the pronunciation of /ə/ is changed, thus realizing one of the three close sounds [i, ɨ, u], depending on the consonant in place.
/a/ may typically be heard as more fronted before a mid vowel /e/, and may also be realized as an open-mid [ɛ] in some environments.

Media

Inside China

The Qinghai Tibetan Radio (མཚོ་སྔོན་བོད་སྐད་རླུང་འཕྲིན།) station broadcasts in Amdolese Tibetan on FM 99.7.

Diaspora

Radio Free Asia broadcasts in three Tibetan languages: Standard Tibetan, Khams language and Amdolese language.

References

Norbu, Kalsang, Karl Peet, dPal Idan bKra shis, & Kevin Stuart, Modern Oral Amdo Tibetan: A Language Primer. Edwin Mellen Press, 2000.
Hua Kan 华侃主编 (ed). 2001. Vocabulary of Amdo Tibetan dialects [藏语安多方言词汇]. Lanzhou: Gansu People's Press [甘肃民族出版社]. (Contains word lists of the Xiahe County 夏河, Tongren County 同仁, Xunhua County 循化, Hualong County 化隆, Hongyuan County 红原, and Tianjun County 天峻 dialects in Gansu and Qinghai provinces.)

External links

This article uses material from the Wikipedia English article Amdo Tibetan, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
®Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wiki Foundation, Inc. Wiki English (DUHOCTRUNGQUOC.VN) is an independent company and has no affiliation with Wiki Foundation.