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Bhutan Languages
Bhutanese speak one or more of four major, mutually
unintelligible languages. Traditionally, public and
private
communications, religious materials, and official
documents were
written in chhokey, the classical Tibetan script,
and a
Bhutanese adaptive cursive script was developed for
correspondence.
In modern times, as in the past, chhokey, which
exists only
in written form, was understood only by the well educated.
The
official national language, Dzongkha (language of the
dzong), has developed since the seventeenth
century. A
sophisticated form of the Tibetan dialect spoken by Ngalop
villagers in western Bhutan, it is based primarily on the
vernacular speech of the Punakha Valley. In its written
form,
Dzongkha uses an adaptive cursive script based on
chhokey to
express the Ngalop spoken language. Ngalopkha is spoken in
six
regional dialects with variations from valley to valley
and village
to village; Dzongkha, however, through vigorous government
education programs, was becoming widely understood
throughout
Bhutan by the 1970s.
The other languages include Sharchopkha, or Tsangla, a
Mon
language spoken in eastern districts; Bumthangkha, an
aboriginal
Khen language spoken in central Bhutan; and Nepali, or
Lhotsam,
predominantly spoken in the south. Seven other Khen and
Mon
languages also are spoken in Bhutan. Hindi is understood
among
Bhutanese educated in India and was the language of
instruction in
the schools at Ha and Bumthang in the early 1930s as well
as in the
first schools in the "formal" education system from the
beginning
of the 1960s.
Along with Dzongkha and English, Nepali was once one of
the
three official languages used in Bhutan. Dzongkha was
taught in
grades one through twelve in the 1980s. English was widely
understood and was the medium of instruction in secondary
and
higher-level schools. Starting in the 1980s, college-level
textbooks in Dzongkha were published, and in 1988 a
proposal was
made to standardize Dzongkha script. Sharchopkha,
Bumthangkha, and
Nepali also were used in primary schools in areas where
speakers of
those languages predominated. In 1989, however, Nepali was
dropped
from school curricula.
Part of the government's effort to preserve traditional
culture
and to strengthen the contemporary sense of national
identity
(driglam namzha--national customs and etiquette)
has been
its emphasis on Dzongkha-language study. The Department of
Education declared in 1979 that because Dzongkha was the
national
language, it was "the responsibility of each and every
Bhutanese to
learn Dzongkha." To aid in language study, the department
also
published a Dzongkha dictionary in 1986.
Data as of September 1991
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