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At the same time, a significant amount of Tibetan politics, culture, and religion are rooted in India. The great scholars, yogis and universities of Buddhist India have long been muses for Tibetan society and even today, Tibetan masters speak admiringly of India and its history. The Tibetan alphabet, for example, was devised by Thonmi Sambota, a minister sent to India in the 7th century. Thonmi Sambota’s mission was to bring back a Buddhist teacher and teachings and during his travels, he devised the Tibetan alphabet based on an Indian script, the Brahmi. The new alphabet served as a foundation for Tibetan scholasticism and an intensive translation project that spanned centuries. Tibetan translators translated masses of Indian Buddhist texts with such care that they remain key sources for the study of Buddhist history to this day.

The distinction between what I studied, Modern Standard Tibetan, and the dialect of Kham reflects this hybridity. As its name implies, Modern Standard Tibetan is a modern, standardized form of Tibetan that developed in exile. As people from different parts of Tibet fled the Chinese invasion and occupation, people with different dialects collected in places like Nepal and India in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Over time, the exiles painstakingly rebuilt their lives, and a standardized Tibetan emerged based on the rules of Central Tibetan dialect.

Central Tibetan, with its connection to Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, is more formal and structured. In this regard, it’s similar to other standard dialects like Parisian French or Oxford English. Other dialects on the Tibetan plateau can be quite different from one another and are much less rule bound. At the Buddhist centre I attended in New York, one lama spoke a local dialect from Eastern Tibet other lamas from neighbouring vallies often found incomprehensible. Likewise, my graduate advisor learnt Modern Standard Tibetan only to discover during his fieldwork that he couldn’t understand anything the people in Kham were saying. Chinese public television in Tibet seems to have softened these regional differences but differences persist.