Sherpa language

Sherpa is a Tibetic language spoken in Nepal and the Indian state of Sikkim, mainly by the Sherpa. The majority of speakers of the Sherpa language live in the Khumbu region of Nepal, spanning from the Chinese border in the east to the Bhotekosi River in the west. About 127,000 speakers live in Nepal, some 16,000 in Sikkim, India, and some 800 in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Sherpa is a subject-object-verb language. Sherpa is predominantly a spoken language, although it is occasionally written using either the Devanagari or Tibetan script.

Geographical distribution

Sherpa is spoken east of the Himalayan region in Nepal Langtang to Olangchungola in the following districts of Nepal.

Koshi Province
*Solukhumbu District
*Okhaldhunga District
*Sankhuwasabha District
*Taplejung District
*Ilam District
*Bhojpur District
Bagmati Province
*Ramechhap District
*Dolakha District
*Sindhupalchowk District
*Rasuwa District
Classification

Sherpa belongs to the Tibetic branch of the Tibeto-Burman family. It is closely related to Central Tibetan, Jirel, Humla, Mugom, Dolpo, Lo-ke, Nubri, Tsum, Langtang, Kyirong, Yolmo, Gyalsumdo, Kagate, Lhomi, Walung, and Tokpe Gola. The Sherpa language five closely related dialects, these being Solu, Khumbu, Pharak, Dram, and Sikkimese Sherpa.

Phonology

Sherpa is a tonal language. Sherpa has the following consonants:

Consonants

Stop sounds can be unreleased in word-final position.
Palatal sounds can neutralize to velar sounds when preceding.
can become a retroflex nasal when preceding a retroflex stop.
can have an allophone of when occurring in fast speech.
/l/ and /r/ are devoiced at the end of a word or before a consonant.
Vowels
Vowel sounds have the allophones when between consonants and in closed syllables.
Tones

There are four distinct tones; high, high falling, low, and low rising. Regardless of the regular tone of the word, the last syllable of a question is to be pronounced with a rising tone.

Grammar

Verbs

Verb stems are modified for aspect and mood. The imperfective and perfective aspects and the volitional, infinitive, disjunct, and imperative moods are differentiated. In verb suffixes, the infinitive, disjunct, past observational, mirative, volitional, augmentative, participle, durative, hortative, dictative, descentive, ablative, and locative are distinguished. A verb stem may take on up to three suffixes. The perfective and imperfective aspects are often treated as past and non-past tenses, respectively. The labels "locative" and "ablative" do not refer to the function of the aspect but rather the homomorphous case-like clitic of the same name. Sherpa is strictly verb-final.

Form	Suffix
Infinitive	-u/-p
Disjunct/Hortative	-i
Past Observational	-suŋ
Mirative	-nɔk
Volitional	-ĩ
Augmentative	-a
Participle	-CṼ,-n
Durative	-i
Dictative	-si
Ablative	-ne
Locative	-la

The infinitive also marks the verb of a relative clause and a general action with no specific subject.
The ablative marking denotes successive actions with some causal relationship.
The locative marking denotes when the action in the main clause is done for the purpose of achieving the action in the locative clause.
The copulais used for existence, location, identity, and adjectival predicates. The evidential particle wɛ́ occurs at the end of phrases to denote an action which the speaker witnessed. The negative particle má is used with perfective verbs.

Nouns

There are four case-like clitics in Sherpa: nominative, genitive, locative, and ablative. These can also be used to mark arguments of a verb. There is a split-ergative system based on aspect; nominative-accusative in the imperfective and ergative-absolutive in the perfective.

Pronouns

Personal pronouns in Sherpa inflect for number and case. Third-person pronouns may be used as demonstratives, and the third person singular nominative also serves as the postnominal definite marker.
There are two articles, which occur phrase-finally. The indefinite form is signaled with the enclitic -i at the end of a noun phrase.

Adjectives

The general word order within noun-phrases is Noun-Adjective. Quantifiers and numerals also follow the noun they modify. Numerals may take on the suffix -pa to denote ordinality or -kʌr to denote collectivity.

Gloss				-	-
one	čìk	༡ — གཅིག	eleven	čučik	༡༡ — བཅུ་གཅིག
two	ɲì	༢ — གཉིས	twelve	čìŋɲi	༡༢ — བཅུ་གཉིས
three	sùm	༣ — གསུམ	thirteen	čùpsum	༡༣ — བཅུ་གསུམ
four	ǰi	༤ — བཞི	twenty	kʰʌlǰik	༢༠ — ཉིས་བཅུ
five	ŋà	༥ — ལྔ	twenty-one	kʰʌlǰik	༢༡ — ཉིས་བཅུ་གཅིག
six	t̪úk	༦ — དྲུག	thirty	kʰʌlsum	༣༠ — སུམ་བཅུ
seven	d̪in	༧ — བདུན	fifty	kʰʌlŋa	༥༠ — ལྔ་བཅུ
eight	jɛ́	༨ — བརྒྱད	seventy	kʰʌld̪in	༧༠ — བདུན་བཅུ
nine	gu	༩ — དགུ	ninety	kʰʌlgu	༩༠ — དགུ་བཅུ
ten	čì /čìt̪ʰʌmba	༡༠ — བཅུ	one hundred	kʰʌl čìt̪ʰʌmba	༡༠༠ — བརྒྱ

Sample text

The following is a sample text in Sherpa of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Sherpa in Tibetan script
Sherpa in Devanagari script
Sherpa in IAST transliteration
Sherpa in the Wylie transliteration
'''Translation'''