Sikkimese (Tibetan: འབྲས་ལྗོངས་སྐད་, Wylie: 'bras ljongs skad, THL: dren jong ké, Tibetan pronunciation: [ɖɛ̀n dʑòŋ ké]; "rice valley language")[2] is a language of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Bhutia people in Sikkim in northeast India, parts of Koshi province in eastern Nepal, and Bhutan.
The Bhutia refer to their own language as Drendzongké (also spelled Drenjongké, Dranjoke, Denjongka, Denzongpeke or Denzongke) and their homeland as Drendzong (Tibetan: འབྲས་ལྗོངས་, Wylie: 'bras-ljongs, "Rice Valley").
SIL International thus describes the Bhutia writing system as "Bodhi style".
After Indian statehood, Bhutia was one of the many minority languages in the region to be taught in schools over the next few years.
As a result of this, a written language was developed, adopting a modified version of the Tibetan script.
The first literary materials were school books translated from Tibetan, and in the following years original works would be authored, including novels, poetry, and plays.
Bhutia has also been influenced to some degree by the neighbouring Yolmowa and Tamang languages.
[3] Dialects are for the most part quite mutually intelligible in Bhutia as most differences that exist are minor.
One big difference, however, is the lack of honorifics in some Northern villages, discussed in more detail in a separate section below.
It is a local belief that the people in these Northern villages originated from this same area in Bhutan.
Words in Bhutia are split into high or low registers all based on voice quality and pitch.
The register of Bhutia words can be predicted most of the time based on their starting phoneme but nasals and liquids are unpredictable.
[7] Below is a chart of Bhutia consonants, largely following Yliniemi (2005) and van Driem (1992).
[6] Devoiced consonants are pronounced with a slight breathy voice, aspiration, and low pitch.
Likewise, the historical Tibetan phoneme /ny/ is realised as an allophone of /n/ and /ng/, which themselves have mostly lost contrast among speakers.
[6] Plosives and affricates contrast in four distinct ways and it only occurs in the word-initial position.
Just the voiceless unaspirated contrast of /p/, /k/ and /ʔ/ can happen in the word-final position and these are mostly produced as an unreleased [p̚] and velar alternating with the glottal stop [k]~[ʔ].
[7] Dento-Alveolar plosives and affricates are produced with the tongue touching the alveolar ridge and the back of the upper teeth.
That is because the production of final glottals in continuous speech crosses over with vowel length.
A phonetic glottal stop can also happen when it accompanies an utterance-final nasalized vowel.
This central approximant /j/ happen in the high and low registers along with the voiceless fricatives /s, ɕ/ which provide evidence that Bhitia has tonal contrasts.
In regular conversation, the final /l/ is produced as a vowel lengthening and fronting and also only happens in reading and spelling-style pronunciation.
[7] The following are the Bhutia vowels, there are 13 of them: ɛː, ɛ, eː, a, aː, o, oː, øː, yː u, uː, i, and iː.
For the following explanations, the terms "short" and "long" refer to the vowel lengthening.
[4] The last color listed can be difficult for Bhutia speakers in English translation, as the word represents a very large spectrum, encompassing, for example, both tree leaf green and sky blue.
While there are words that describe this range more specifically, they are of (Classical) Tibetan origin and do not see regular use.
[4] There are also a small number of villages that do not generally use honorifics, using the low-level second person pronoun even with strangers.
Examples that have been observed include noun modifiers losing the genitive marker, and the dropping of case marking in directionals.
Verbs in Denjongke show a state of being, feeling, or describe the happenings of events.