<Vocabulary> An Introduction to Khengkha: A Language of Central Bhutan

Abstract

The Kheng Language (also known as Khengkha in Bhutan) is one of the major languages in Central Bhutan, belonging to the East Bodic branch of Tibeto-Burman languages. The main languages spoken in Bhutan are Dzongkha in the western, Bumthap in the central, and Tsangla (a.k.a Sharchop) in the eastern areas. Dzongkha is the national language of Bhutan, and it is spoken as the mother tongue around Thimphu, the nation's capital. It is classified as a southern dialect of Tibetan. Tsangla in eastern Bhutan is also distributed in Arunachal Pradesh in India and metog rdzong in South Tibet, China, spoken by Mon people. Bumthap, in Central Bhutan, has the Mangdep and Kurtöp dialects beside Khengkha, but they have not been studied in detail yet except for Kurtöp. Khenkha is considered a major dialect of Bumthap and it is obvious that the appearance of the language is influenced by Dzongkha, however, they also preserve old constituents, such as the numeral system, that date back to before the formation of written Tibetan. As there is a lack in sufficient data for a historical study on Khengkha, this paper aims to provide a basic vocabulary and grammatical sketch based on the Matisoff 200 Word List, which was designed for the historical study of Tibeto-Burman languages. This list includes written Tibetan and reconstructed Proto-Tibeto-Burman words equated to English items. Through field research, I recorded language data of Dzongkha, Bumthap, and Tsangla. By cross-referencing and comparing Khengkha words to the data collected, we may be able to see and indicate which words are preserving old forms, corresponding to written Tibetan, or borrowing from Dzongkha or surrounding languages. I hope this introductory work containing the word list will contribute to the investigation of the historical development of Khengkha and further field research.