Kurtokha

Kurtöp (Kurtöp: ཀུར་ཏོཏ་པི་ཁ་, Kurtotpikha), also known as Zhâke (ཞཱ་ཀེ་) or Au Gemale (ཨའུ་གེ་མ་ལེ), is an endangered East Bodish language spoken by about 4,500 people primarily in the Lhüntse District of Bhutan. It is spoken by the Kurtöps, a group of subsistence and dairy farmers in the traditional Kurtö region near the Bhutan–China border, though some local Kurtöps speak Dzala or Chocangacakha instead. The language is traditionally considered a dialect of Bumthang, but more recent research has categorized Bumthang and Kurtöp, along with Kheng and Nupbi, as distinct languages within a larger Bumthangic subfamily.

Kurtöp is an agglutinative language with head-initial compounding and a mostly subject–object–verb word order. It is generally described as having active–stative alignment, though elements of ergative–absolutive structures are also present. Phonologically, Kurtöp has a three-way stop distinction between voiced, unvoiced, and unvoiced aspirated stops, which is typical of East Bodish languages. The language departs from its cousins in having innovated retroflex consonants and having the fewest allowed consonant clusters at twelve, which are only found in fewer than 0.01% of attested words. The language is currently undergoing tonogenesis, or developing phonemic tone; it contrasts between high and low tones, though only in specific phonetic environments. Unlike other tonal languages, Kurtöp also has a stress accent, typically falling on the first syllable of the root.

In collaboration with the Bhutanese government, a team led by the American linguist Gwendolyn Hyslop has developed an orthography based on the Uchen form of Tibetan script. Linguistic literature, however, tends to prefer the form written in the Latin alphabet based largely on the Romanization of Dzongkha, Bhutan's national language.

From Wikipedia · Kurtöp language · CC BY-SA 4.0