The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descended from Old Tibetan. According to Tournadre (2014), there are 50 languages, which split into over 200 dialects or could be grouped into 8 dialect continua. These languages are spoken in the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas in Gilgit-Baltistan, Aksai Chin, Ladakh, Nepal, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Bhutan. Classical Tibetan is the major literary language, particularly for its use in Buddhist literature.
Jean Filliozat was a French writer. He studied medicine and was a physician between 1930 and 1947. He learned Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and Tamil. He wrote some important works on the history of Indian medicine. He taught at Collège de France from 1952 to 1978.
LACITO is a multidisciplinary research organisation, principally devoted to the study of cultures and languages of oral tradition.
André-Georges Haudricourt was a French botanist, anthropologist and linguist.
Rolf Alfred Stein was a German-born French Sinologist and Tibetologist. He contributed in particular to the study of the Epic of King Gesar, on which he wrote two books, and the use of Chinese sources in Tibetan history. He was the first scholar to correctly identify the Minyag of Tibetan sources with the Xixia of Chinese sources.
Marcelle Lalou (1890–1967) was a 20th-century French Tibetologist. Her major contribution to Tibetology was the cataloging of the entire Pelliot collection of Old Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In addition to her cataloging work, she wrote articles on various aspects of Old Tibet, and she published a Tibetan textbook. Some of her most notable students include Rolf A. Stein and J. W. de Jong.
Jacques Bacot was an explorer and pioneering French Tibetologist. He travelled extensively in India, western China, and the Tibetan border regions. He worked at the École pratique des hautes études. Bacot was the first western scholar to study the Tibetan grammatical tradition, and along with F. W. Thomas (1867–1956) belonged to the first generation of scholars to study the Old Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts. Bacot made frequent use of Tibetan informants. He acquired aid from Gendün Chöphel in studying Dunhuang manuscripts.
Bernard Cerquiglini, is a French linguist.
The Gyalrongic languages constitute a branch of the Qiangic languages of Sino-Tibetan, but some propose that it may be part of a larger Rung languages group and do not consider it to be particularly closely related to Qiangic but suggest that similarities between Gyalrongic and Qiangic may be from areal influence. However, other work suggests that Qiangic as a whole may in fact be paraphyletic, with the only commonalities of the supposed "branch" being shared archaisms and areal features that were encouraged by language contact. Jacques & Michaud (2011) propose that Qiangic including Gyalrongic may belong to a larger Burmo-Qiangic group based on some lexical innovations.
Françoise Pommaret is a French ethno-historian and Tibetologist.
Tibetan numerals is the numeral system of the Tibetan script and a variety of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system. It is used in the Tibetan language and has a base-10 counting system. The Mongolian numerals were also developed from the Tibetan numerals.
Denise Bernot was a French academic who was professor of Burmese at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales from 1960 to 1989. She was the widow of Lucien Bernot (1919–1993) who was professor at the Collège de France in the chair 'Sociographie de l'Asie du Sud-Est'. She was an alumna of the École des Chartes.
Françoise Robin is a Tibetan-studies professor at Paris' National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), where she specialises in the language, cinema, and literature of Tibet. Robin is currently the general secretary of the International Association for Tibetan Studies.
Claude Hagège is a French linguist.
Françoise Ozanne-Rivierre (1941–2007) was a French linguist based at LACITO–CNRS, internationally known for her work on the languages of New Caledonia.
Zbu, or Showu, is a Rgyalrong language spoken in Sichuan, China.
Andrzej Aleksander Włodarczyk, known as André Wlodarczyk, is a Polish-French linguist.
Nicolas Vatin is a French epigrapher and historian, specializing in the study of the Ottoman Empire. His brother, François Vatin, is a professor of sociology at the Paris West University Nanterre La Défenser.
François Georgeon is a French historian specialising in the Ottoman Empire and contemporary Turkey.
Claude Rilly is a French linguist, Egyptologist, and archaeologist at the CNRS who primarily specializes in Meroitic and Nilo-Saharan languages.
