The most important, an official orthography aimed to facilitate the translation of Buddhist scriptures emerged during the early 9th century.

Standard orthography has not been altered since then, while the spoken language has changed by, for example, losing complex consonant clusters.

[10] However, modern Buddhist practitioners in the Indian subcontinent state that the classical orthography should not be altered even when used for lay purposes.

Syllables are separated by a tsek (་); since many Tibetan words are monosyllabic, this mark often functions almost as a space.

However, since tones developed from segmental features, they can usually be correctly predicted by the archaic spelling of Tibetan words.

In both cases, the symbol for ཀ /ka/ is used, but when the ར /ra/ is in the middle of the consonant and vowel, it is added as a subscript.

[14] The head (མགོ in Tibetan, Wylie: mgo) letter, or superscript, position above a radical is reserved for the consonants ར /ra/, ལ /la/, and ས /sa/.

There is no distinction between long and short vowels in written Tibetan, except in loanwords, especially transcribed from the Sanskrit.

Multiple Romanization and transliteration systems have been created in recent years, but do not fully represent the true phonetic sound.

Below is a table with Tibetan letters and different Romanization and transliteration system for each letter, listed below systems are: Wylie transliteration (W), Tibetan pinyin (TP), Dzongkha phonetic (DP), ALA-LC Romanization (A)[16] and THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription (THL).

This keyboard layout was standardized by the Dzongkha Development Commission (DDC) and the Department of Information Technology (DIT) of the Royal Government of Bhutan in 2000.

It was updated in 2009 to accommodate additional characters added to the Unicode & ISO 10646 standards since the initial version.

The Dzongka keyboard layout is included in Microsoft Windows, Android, and most distributions of Linux as part of XFree86.

It includes letters, digits and various punctuation marks and special symbols used in religious texts: