Tradition · language & script · Bhutan

Dzongkha and the Bhutanese script

Function

Text & inscription

Confidence

Not assessed

Location

27.470, 89.640

Worth knowing

Dzong kha means the language of the fortress: it spread as the speech of the dzongs, the administration, rather than as anyone's village dialect, which is why it became national.

Connections (2)

• TransmissionNālandā mahāvihāra

  The alphabet Bhutan writes in came from India. The Tibetan script was devised in the seventh century from an Indic model — generally identified as a Gupta-period Brahmi derivative — by an envoy sent south for the purpose, and Bhutan writes it in two hands of its own, the formal ucen and the cursive joyi used by the dzongs. The classical language of Bhutanese religion is literary Tibetan, which exists largely as a vehicle for translated Sanskrit, so the script and its cargo both travelled the same way.

• AnalogueGrantha script

  Brahmi went two ways out of India and both are still written. Southward, the Pallava hand became Grantha and then the scripts of Southeast Asia — Kawi, Khmer, Thai, Burmese, Balinese. Northward, a Gupta-period derivative became the Tibetan alphabet and through it the writing of Bhutan, Ladakh, Sikkim and Mongolia. The two families look nothing alike now, and a Thai and a Bhutanese sign share an ancestor about as close as Latin and Devanagari.

On these journeys

• Bhutan — the dzongs and the Drukpa

Sources

Wikipedia, “Dzongkha” and “Tibetan script”. George van Driem, Dzongkha (1998); Bhutan Dzongkha Development Commission.

• Wikipedia — Dzongkha