Dege Kham Dialect Dictionary

Yontan rGyamtsho

About this app

Study the spoken Dege dialect of Tibetan with this comprehensive trilingual dictionary.

The Tibetan literary (or written) language and its script have a long history, going back to the middle of the 7th century. There are many excellent dictionaries of the literary language which help the user master that genre of Tibetan.

Learn the spoken language:
The colloquial dialects of Tibetan vary significantly from the literary language, and as these colloquial languages are not typically written down, there are very few dictionaries of the colloquial language. The few extant dictionaries of the colloquial dialects are in the Lhasa and Amdo dialects. This is a dictionary of the Dege dialect, which is a major dialect in the Kham cluster of dialects. The Dege dialect is a prestigious dialect, considered so because of its close relationship to literary Tibetan.

Recordings and phonetics to help with pronunciation:
This dictionary is not intended to replace the literary language dictionaries. Its primary purpose is to aid non-native speakers of the Dege dialect to learn to speak this dialect. It uses the Tibetan script to write the language down, and the phonetic transcription and the recordings are there to aid the learner in pronouncing the words.

- Trilingual Tibetan - Chinese - English dictionary
- Search for words in all 3 languages
- Search history
- Parts of speech
- Definitions, example sentences
- Phonetic spelling using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
- Audio recordings for words and example sentences
- Guide to understanding the Dege dialect
- Reference of phonology and verbs

What’s new

New in this version:
- Redesigned homepage, you can scroll through the entire dictionary
- Flashcards! Personalize your learning
- Enhanced search, including keyword filtering (and scrolling) of results
- Audio updates and audio download capability