The Khara-Khoto documents are at present preserved in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg.

[7] The collections amount to about 10,000 volumes, of mostly Buddhist texts, law codes and legal documents dating from mid-11th up to early 13th centuries.

Among the Buddhist texts a number of unique compilations, not known either in Chinese or in Tibetan versions, were recently discovered.

Furthermore, the Buddhist canon, the Chinese classics, and a great number of indigenous texts written in Tangut have been preserved.

Thus although in Chinese more than 90% of the characters possess a phonetic element, this proportion is limited to about 10% in Tangut according to Sofronov.

The discovery of the Pearl in the Palm, a Tangut–Chinese bilingual glossary, permitted Ivanov (1909) and Laufer (1916) to propose initial reconstructions and to undertake the comparative study of Tangut.

The record of the pronunciation in these dictionaries is made using the principle of fǎnqiè, borrowed from the Chinese lexicographic tradition.

Nonetheless, it is necessary to compare the phonological system of the dictionaries with the other sources in order to "fill in" the categories with a phonetic value.

Later, substantial contribution to the research of Tangut language was done by Tatsuo Nishida (西田龍雄), Ksenia Kepping, Gong Hwang-cherng (龔煌城), M.V.

Leading scholars include Shi Jinbo (史金波), Li Fanwen, Nie Hongyin (聶鴻音), Bai Bin (白濱) in mainland China, and Gong Hwang-cherng and Lin Ying-chin (林英津) in Taiwan.

In other countries, leading scholars in the field include Yevgeny Kychanov and his student K. J. Solonin in Russia, Nishida Tatsuo and Shintarō Arakawa (荒川慎太郎) in Japan, and Ruth W. Dunnell in the United States.

In early phonetic reconstructions, all four were separately accounted for, but it has since been realized that grades three and four are in complementary distribution, depending on the initial.

Gong further posits phonemic vowel length and points to evidence that indicates that Tangut had a distinction that Chinese lacked.

Like other Gyalrongic languages, Tangut verbs are highly synthetic with many different morphological slots.

In other Qiangic languages that possess high levels of pronominalization such as Japhug and Khroskyabs, NI is still a more syntactically productive process with widespread uses.

This stem alternation pattern originates from a 3rd person object suffix of the form *-w as is also found in other Sino-Tibetan languages.