Script selection for Tibetan-related languages in multiscriptal environments
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Bradford Lynn Chamberlain
Abstract
Written development of Tibetan-related languages has seen an increase in recent years. When these languages are developed, the issue of script becomes very important. The Tibetan script has strong associations with the classical Tibetan language, and has been used primarily for writing Tibetan Buddhist religious works. As such, attitudes towards variation of its complex orthographic principles are quite conservative. In some regions (Tibet and Bhutan), the Tibetan orthography is clearly the preferable writing system for any written forms of these modern Tibetan languages.
However, due to the conservative attitudes, adjusting the orthography to represent the reality of the modern languages can be a divisive exercise. In other regions where Tibetan-related languages are spoken (India, Nepal, and Pakistan), there are other scripts which may be considered in developing these modern Tibetan languages. Even in these situations the ethnolinguistic identity associated with the Tibetan script suggests that use of a modified Tibetan orthography is more acceptable than use of other scripts (though they may be more accessible). This article discusses some of the key issues involved in developing Tibetan languages in these multiscriptal environments, and gives examples from several such languages which are in varying stages of development.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- The sociolinguistics of script choice: an introduction
- Writing Tuareg — the three script options
- The Khom script of the Kommodam Rebellion
- A social orthography of identity: the N'ko literacy movement in West Africa
- The ascendancy of the Cham script: how a literacy workshop became the catalyst
- Missionary contributions toward the revaluation of Hangeul in late nineteenth-century Korea
- Choosing how to write sign language: a sociolinguistic perspective
- Indexicality, voice, and context in the distribution of Cherokee scripts
- Script change in Azerbaijan: acts of identity
- Script selection for Tibetan-related languages in multiscriptal environments
- Nonconventional script choice in Japan
- Script choice among the Miao in China
- Emblems of independence: script choice in post-Soviet Turkmenistan
- Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, edited by Seth L. Sanders
