The creation of the Tibetan script is traditionally ascribed to Thonmi Sambhota in the mid-7th century. However, no Old Tibetan texts mention such a person. The Tibetan script was most likely introduced for administrative purposes in 650 (the first dated year in the Old Tibetan Annals).

The form of the letters is based on an Indic alphabet of that period, but which specific Indic script inspired the Tibetan alphabet remains controversial.

The printed form of the script is called uchen script (; "with a head") while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday writing is called umé script (; "headless").

Although the Tibetan script is assumed to accurately reflect the pronunciation of Tibetan at the time of its invention, in all modern dialects, in particular Lhasa, the pronuncation and spelling differ significantly, due to phonetic change. This is why some people are in favour of transliterating Tibetan "as it is pronounced". One thus often sees Kagyu instead of Bka'-rgyud.

This article employs the Wylie transliteration system.

The 30 consonants, which are deemed to possess an inherent sound a, are the following (with alternative transliterations in parentheses):

The h or apostrophe (’) usually signifies aspiration, but in the case of zh and sh it signifies palatalization and the single letter h represents a voiceless glottal fricative.

Old Tibetan had no letter w, which was instead a digraph for 'w.

Consonantal letter variations include:

• The Sanskrit "cerebral" (retroflex) consonants are represented by the letters ta, tha, da, na, and sha turned vertically to give ཊ ṭa (Ta), ཋ ṭha (Tha), ཌ ḍa (Da), ཎ ṇa (Na), and ཥ ṣa (Sa).
• As in other Indic scripts, clustered consonants are often stacked vertically. Unfortunately, some fonts and applications do not support this behavior for Tibetan, so these examples may not display properly; you might have to download a font such as Tibetan Machine Uni.
  • W, r, and y change form when they are beneath another consonant; thus ཀྭ kwa; ཀྲ kra; ཀྱ kya. R also changes form when it is above most other consonants; thus རྐ rka. An exception is the cluster རྙ rnya.

The vowels are a, i, u, e, o. As in other Indic scripts, each consonant letter includes an inherent a, and the other vowels are indicated by marks; thus ཀ ka, ཀི ki, ཀུ ku, ཀེ ke, ཀོ ko (again, these marks may not display properly). Old Tibetan included a gigu 'verso' of uncertain meaning. There is no distinction between long and short vowels in written Tibetan, except in loanwords, especially transcribed from the Sanskrit.

Syllables are separated by a tseg ་; since many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, this mark often functions almost as a space. Spaces are not used to divide words.

Although some Tibetan dialects are tonal, because the language had no tone at the time of the scripts invention, tones are not written. However, since tones developed from segmental features they can ususlly be correctly predicted by the spelling of Tibetan words.

Tibetan in Unicode

The Unicode Tibetan block is U+0F00 – U+0FFF. It includes letters, digits and various punctuation marks and special symbols used in religious texts (you will need Unicode fonts covering this block installed to view the table properly in your web browser):

Besides Tibetan, the Dzongkha language and Ladakhi language is written in the Tibetan script.

See also

• Tibetan Pinyin
• THDL Simplified Phonetic Transcription

External links

• 2 fonts - not Unicode compatible.
• 2 fonts: 1 Macintosh, not Unicode compatible.
• Omniglot's Guide to the Tibetan writing system
• Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library - articles on Unicode font issues; free cross-platform OpenType font - Unicode compatible.
• free Tibetan fonts project.
• Tibetan Calligraphy - how to write the Tibetan script.
• Tibetan writing course.
• Elements of The Tibetan writing system.
• Introduction to Tibetan Orthography, at Kuro5hin

Abugida writing systems | Skritur tibetek | Tibetische Schrift | Tibeta alfabeto | チベット文字 | Тибетский алфавит | 藏文字母