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Dzongkha is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by over half a million people in Bhutan; it is the sole official and national language of the Kingdom of Bhutan. The Tibetan script is used to write Dzongkha.
Trashigang District is Bhutan's easternmost dzongkhag (district).
Trashiyangtse District is one of the twenty dzongkhags (districts) comprising Bhutan. It was created in 1992 when Trashiyangtse district was split off from Trashigang District. Trashiyangtse covers an area of 1,437.9 square kilometres (555.2 sq mi). At an elevation of 1750–1880 m, Trashi yangtse dzongkhag is rich of culture filled with sacred places blessed by Guru Rimpoche and dwelled by Yangtseps, Tshanglas, Bramis from Tawang, Khengpas from Zhemgang and Kurtoeps from Lhuentse.
The Sharchops are the populations of mixed Tibetan, Southeast Asian and South Asian descent that mostly live in the eastern districts of Bhutan.
The Ngalop are people of Tibetan origin who migrated to Bhutan as early as the ninth century. Orientalists adopted the term "Bhote" or Bhotiya, meaning "people of Bod (Tibet)", a term also applied to the Tibetan people, leading to confusion, and now is rarely used in reference to the Ngalop.
Articles related to Bhutan include:
Tshangla is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Bodish branch closely related to the Tibetic languages and much of its vocabulary derives from Classical Tibetan. Tshangla is primarily spoken in Eastern Bhutan and acts as a lingua franca in the country particularly among Sharchop/Tshangla communities; it is also spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, India, and Tibet. Tshangla is the principal pre-Tibetan (pre-Dzongkha) language of Bhutan.
Mêdog, or Metok, or Motuo County, also known as Pemako, is a county as well as a traditional region of the prefecture-level city of Nyingchi in the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Pemako is considered famous as the Nyingma master Dudjom Rinpoche's birthplace, and as a prophesied refuge for Tibetan Buddhists by Padmasambhava.
There are numerous ethnic groups in Bhutan, and no one group constitutes a majority of the Bhutanese population. The Bhutanese are of four main ethnic groups, which themselves are not necessarily exclusive: the politically and culturally dominant Ngalop of western and northern Bhutan; the Sharchop of eastern Bhutan; the Lhotshampa concentrated in southern Bhutan; and Bhutanese tribal and aboriginal peoples living in villages scattered throughout Bhutan.
The French Internet site "Aide à l'Eglise en détresse" puts the figure of Christians in Bhutan at 12,255, with 1,000 Roman Catholics, making it a total of 0.9% of the population. The population also consists of 84% Buddhists, 11.4% Hindus, 3.4% Animists and 0.3% uncategorized.
There are two dozen languages of Bhutan, all members of the Tibeto-Burman language family except for Nepali, which is an Indo-Aryan language, and Bhutanese Sign Language. Dzongkha, the national language, is the only language with a native literary tradition in Bhutan, though Lepcha and Nepali are literary languages in other countries. Other non-Bhutanese minority languages are also spoken along Bhutan's borders and among the primarily Nepali-speaking Lhotshampa community in South and East Bhutan.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Bhutan:
The Khengkha language, or Kheng, is an East Bodish language spoken by ~40,000 native speakers worldwide, in the Zhemgang, Trongsa, and Mongar districts of south–central Bhutan.
The East Bodish languages are a small group of non-Tibetic Bodish languages spoken in eastern Bhutan and adjacent areas of Tibet and India. They include:
Gongduk or Gongdu is an endangered Sino-Tibetan language spoken by about 1,000 people in a few inaccessible villages located near the Kuri Chhu river in the Gongdue Gewog of Mongar District in eastern Bhutan. The names of the villages are Bala, Dagsa, Damkhar, Pam, Pangthang, and Yangbari (Ethnologue).
ʼOle, also called ʼOlekha or Black Mountain Monpa, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by about 1,000 people in the Black Mountains of Wangdue Phodrang and Trongsa Districts in western Bhutan. The term ʼOle refers to a clan of speakers.
The Bumthang language ; also called "Bhumtam", "Bumtang(kha)", "Bumtanp", "Bumthapkha", and "Kebumtamp") is an East Bodish language spoken by about 20,000 people in Bumthang and surrounding districts of Bhutan. Van Driem (1993) describes Bumthang as the dominant language of central Bhutan.
The Pemakö dialect is a dialect of the Tshangla language. It is the predominant speech in the Pemako region of the Tibet Autonomous Region and an adjoining contiguous area south of the McMahon line in Arunachal Pradesh in India. Though Tshangla is not a Tibetic language, it shares many similarities with Classical Tibetan, particularly in its vocabulary. Many Tibetan loanwords are used in Pemako, due to centuries of close contact with various Tibetan tribes in the Pemako area. Pemako Tshangla has undergone tremendous changes due to its isolation and Tibetan influence.
Jomolhari is a Tibetan script Uchen font created by Christopher Fynn, freely available under the Open Font License. It supports text encoded using the Unicode Standard and the Chinese national standard for encoding characters of the Tibetan script. The design of the font is based on Bhutanese manuscript examples and it is suitable for text in Tibetan, Dzongkha and other languages written in the Tibetan script.
Bhutanese Literature is written in various languages including Nepali language and Dzongkha in Bhutan. It dates back to 1950s. Earlier, Bhutanese literature used to be centered on religious teachings, and, now, it is more focused on folklores.