Sikkimese language

Sikkimese
Dranjongke
Spoken in	Sikkim, Bhutan
Ethnicity	Bhutia
Native speakers	70,300  (2001)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman) Tibeto-Kanauri Bodish Tibetan Central Tibetan Southern Sikkimese
Writing system	Tibetan script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	sip
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The Sikkimese language, also called Sikkimese Tibetan, Bhutia, Dranjongke (Tibetan: འབྲས་ལྗོངས་སྐད་, Wylie: 'bras-ljongs-skad), Dranjoke, Denjongka, Denzongpeke, and Denzongke, belongs to the Southern Tibetan language family. It is spoken by the Bhutia (Denzongpa) nationality in Sikkim. Sikkimese people refer to their own language as Dranjongke and their homeland as Denzong (Tibetan: འབྲས་ལྗོངས་, Wylie: 'bras-ljongs; "Valley of Rice").^[1]

Script

Main article: Tibetan script

Sikkimese is written using Tibetan script, which it inherited from Classical Tibetan. Sikkimese phonology and lexicon differ markedly from Classical Tibetan, however. SIL thus describes the Sikkimese writing system as "Bodhi style." According to SIL, 68% of Sikkimese Bhutia were literate in the Tibetan script in 2001.^[1][2][3]

Sikkimese and its neighbors

Speakers of Sikkimese can understand some Dzongkha, with a lexical similarity of 65% between the two languages. By comparison, Standard Tibetan, however, is only 42% lexically similar. Sikkimese has also been influenced to some degree by the neighboring Yolmowa and Tamang languages.^[1][2]

Due to more than a century of close contact with speakers of Nepali and Tibetan proper, many Sikkimese speakers also use these languages in daily life.^[1]

Phonology

Consonants

Below is a chart of Sikkimese consonants, largely following Yliniemi (2005) and van Driem (1992).^[3]

		Labial	Dental/ Alveolar	Retroflex	Alveolo-palatal/ Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	voiceless		n̥ ན /n/			ŋ̥ ང /ng/
	voiced	m མ /m/	n ན /n/		n~ŋ ཉ /ny/	ŋ ང /ng/
Plosive	voiceless unaspirated	p པ /p/	t ཏ /t/	ʈ ཏྲ /tr/		k ཀ /k/	ʔ འ /ʔ/
	voiceless aspirated	pʰ ཕ /ph/	tʰ ཐ /th/	ʈʰ ཐྲ /thr/		kʰ ཁ /kh/
	voiced	b བ /b/	d ད /d/	ɖ དྲ /dr/		ɡ ག /g/
	devoiced	p̀ʱ བ /p'/	t̀ʱ ད /t'/	ʈ̀ʱ དྲ /tr'/		k̀ʱ ག /k'/
Affricate	voiceless unaspirated		ts ཙ /ts/		tɕ ཅ /c/
	voiceless aspirated		tsʰ ཚ /tsh/		tɕʰ ཆ /ch/
	voiced		dz ཛ /dz/		dʑ ཇ /j/
	devoiced				tɕ' ཇ /c'/
Fricative	voiceless		s ས /s/		ɕ ཤ /sh/		h ཧ /h/
	voiced		z ཟ /z/		ʑ ཞ /zh/
Liquid	voiceless		l̥ ལ /l/	r̥ ར /r/
	voiced		l ལ /l/	r~ɹ~ɾ ར /r/
Approximant		w ཝ /w/			j ཡ /y/	w ཝ /w/

Devoiced consonants are pronounced with a slight breathy voice, aspiration (phonetics), and low pitch. They are remnants of voiced consonants in Classical Tibetan that became devoiced. Likewise, the historical Tibetan phoneme /ny/ is realized as an allophone of /n/ and /ng/, which themselves have mostly lost contrast among speakers.^[3]

Vowels

Below is a chart of Sikkimese vowels, also largely following Yliniemi (2005).^[3]

	Front		Middle	Back
	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded
Close	i　 ི /i/	y　 ུ /u/		u　 ུ /u/
Mid	e　 ེ /e/	ø　 ོ /o/		o　 ོ /o/
Open	ɛ　 ེ /e/		ɐ /a/

In the Tibetan script, an abugida, the inherent vowel /a/ is unmarked. In the above table, italicized [ɛ] /e/ is an allophone of [e] /e/, confined to appearing after [dʑ] /j/ in closed syllables.^[3]

See also

• Bhutia people
• Lepcha people
• Lepcha language
• Indigenous peoples of Sikkim
• History of Sikkim

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d} Lewis, M. Paul, ed (2009). "Sikkimese". Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=sip. Retrieved 2011-04-16. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Norboo, S. (1995). "The Sikkimese Bhutia" (PDF). Bulletin of Tibetology. Gangtok: Namgyal Institute of Tibetology. pp. 114–115. http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/bot/pdf/bot_1995_01_25.pdf. 
3. ^ ^{a b c d e} Yliniemi, Juha (2005). Preliminary Phonological Analysis of Denjongka of Sikkim (Masters, General Linguistics thesis). University of Helsinki. https://oa.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/4310/prelimin.pdf. Retrieved 2011-04-17. 

Further reading

• van Driem, George (1992). The grammar of Dzongkha. Dzongkha Development Commission, Government of Bhutan. http://books.google.com/books?id=0KsCYgEACAAJ.