Tibetan Alphabet & Letters

Tibetan is written in its own script, བོད་ཡིག (bod yig, Tibetan letters). Tradition holds that the minister Thonmi Sambhota made it in the 7th century for the king Songtsen Gampo, after an Indian script of the time, and it is still close to its Indian cousins: like Devanagari it is an abugida, where every consonant carries a built-in vowel a. ཀ on its own is ka.

The alphabet has 30 consonants, learned in lines of four, as in the grid: ཀ ཁ ག ང (ka kha ga nga), ཅ ཆ ཇ ཉ (ca cha ja nya), ཏ ཐ ད ན, པ ཕ བ མ, ཙ ཚ ཛ ཝ, ཞ ཟ འ ཡ, ར ལ ཤ ས, and ཧ ཨ. The first lines follow the Indian pattern: plain, aspirated, voiced, nasal. The last letter ཨ is the carrier for a word that starts with a vowel, and འ, the a-chung, is a soft letter mostly found at the start or end of a syllable.

There are only four vowel signs, all written above or below the letter: ི i (gi gu), ུ u (zhabs kyu), ེ e ('greng bu) and ོ o (na ro). So ཀི is ki, ཀུ ku, ཀེ ke and ཀོ ko. Six additional letters, ཊ ཋ ཌ ཌྷ ཎ ཥ, represent the Sanskrit retroflex sounds, which occur in Buddhist texts Tibetan scholars translated for centuries.

Stacks, tsheg and why Tibetan is not spelled as it sounds

A Tibetan syllable is built around a root letter, and up to six letters can gather on it: a prefix before it, a superscript on top (ར ལ ས), a subscript below (ྱ ya, ྲ ra, ླ la, ྭ wa), a vowel sign, and one or two letters after it. Letters on top and below shrink and stack into one tall cluster: ས over ཀ under ྱ gives སྐྱ (skya). In Unicode a stack is typed as the top letter followed by the subjoined forms (the second column of the grid), and the font draws the cluster: ས + ྐ + ྱ = སྐྱ.

Between every two syllables comes a small dot at the top of the line, the tsheg ་. Tibetan puts no spaces between words; the tsheg marks syllables, and the vertical stroke shad ། ends a phrase or sentence. That is why བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས། (tashi delek, the greeting) has three tshegs and ends in ། . Spaces in Tibetan text usually follow a shad, rin chen spungs shad, gter tsheg or visarga.

The spelling was fixed more than a thousand years ago, in reforms of the early 9th century, and the spoken language has moved on. Many letters are now silent or change the sound of others: བསྒྲུབས (bsgrubs, accomplished) is said roughly drup, the name of Tibet བོད (bod) is said pö, and ཐུགས་རྗེ་ཆེ (thugs rje che, thank you) is thuk je che. Central Tibetan also became tonal, and the prefixes and superscripts now mostly tell you the tone. Learners write the spelling in Wylie transliteration (bsgrubs, bkra shis) and the sound separately.

Tibetan punctuation, numbers and the om symbol ༀ

A Tibetan page or letter traditionally opens with the head mark ༄༅། (yig mgo), a stylised flourish, and many printed texts start with ༄༅། ། . Inside the text, ་ separates syllables, ། ends a phrase and the double ༎ a larger section; ༈ marks a new topic, and ༔ (gter tsheg) replaces the shad in terma, the revealed treasure texts of the Nyingma tradition. ༸ is placed before the names and titles of revered lamas, as in ༸གོང་ས་མཆོག for the Dalai Lama. The brackets ༼ ༽ and ༺ ༻ mark notes and inserted text.

Tibetan numbers ༠ ༡ ༢ ༣ ༤ ༥ ༦ ༧ ༨ ༩ come from the same Indian numerals as 0 to 9 and work the same way, so 2026 is ༢༠༢༦. They appear in page numbers of books, on prayer texts, in dates and on calendars; in everyday life, prices and phone numbers are usually in 0 to 9.

The mantra syllables have their own marks. ཾ (a small circle on top) and ྃ (sna ldan, moon and dot) give the nasal ṃ, ཿ the breath ḥ, and ཱ, a small a-chung under a letter, a long ā: ཨོཾ་ཨཱཿཧཱུྃ is om ah hum, and ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པདྨེ་ཧཱུྃ is om mani padme hum, the mantra carved on mani stones and printed on prayer wheels. ༀ is the syllable om as a single sign, the one people mean by the Tibetan om symbol; it is a different character from the Devanagari ॐ and the emoji 🕉️. The ritual objects ࿄ (bell), ࿅ (vajra) and ࿇ (double vajra) are encoded too, along with the gakyil, the swirling joy-wheel ࿊ ࿋.

How to type Tibetan on a keyboard, Mac or phone

Windows 10 and 11 include a Tibetan keyboard: add Tibetan (PRC) under Settings > Time & language > Language (Windows 10) or Language & region (Windows 11), then switch with Windows + Space. You type the letters one by one in the order they are spelled. Mac has three Tibetan input sources, Tibetan – Wylie, Tibetan – Otani and Tibetan – QWERTY; with Wylie you type Latin transliteration: typing bkra shis gives བཀྲ་ཤིས. On phones, Tibetan keyboards are available in the keyboard settings of the iPhone and in Gboard on Android.

All Tibetan characters on this page are real Unicode text from the Tibetan block, U+0F00 to U+0FFF, so they paste into any app that has a Tibetan font. Good fonts are Microsoft Himalaya on Windows, Kailasa on Mac, and the free Noto Serif Tibetan, Jomolhari and Monlam fonts. If you see boxes or letters that do not stack, the font lacks Tibetan or the app cannot build stacks. In HTML a letter can be written by its number, e.g. ཀ for ཀ.

The printed letters on this page are uchen (དབུ་ཅན, "with a head"), the style with a flat top line used in books and signs. Handwriting uses ume (དབུ་མེད, "headless"), a faster joined style; both are the same letters and the same Unicode text, only the font changes.

Where Tibetan is spoken

CLDR estimates about 3 million speakers of Tibetan. About 2.8 million of them live in China 🇨🇳, in the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan. The spoken dialects of Ü-Tsang around Lhasa, Kham and Amdo differ a lot, but all of them write the same literary Tibetan, so a letter written in Amdo reads the same in Lhasa. Counts that include every Tibetan dialect come out higher.

India 🇮🇳 has about 155,000 speakers in CLDR's estimate, most in the exile community that followed the Dalai Lama from 1959: Dharamsala, with McLeod Ganj and the Central Tibetan Administration, the large settlements around Bylakuppe in Karnataka, and Delhi. Nepal 🇳🇵 has about 75,000, around the Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu and in the high valleys of the north. Large communities also live in Switzerland, the United States and Canada.

The same script writes Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan (see the Dzongkha collection), and the languages of Ladakh, Sikkim and many Himalayan peoples, and Mongolian Buddhists used it for religious texts. For flags, the yuan, rupee and the emoji of each country, see the China, India and Nepal collections; Hindi and Nepali, written in Devanagari, have collections of their own.