Tibetan

Standard Tibetan, also called Lhasa Tibetan, is the Tibetic language with the most speakers, spoken mainly in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China and in parts of India and Nepal; the 1990 census counted 1.2 million speakers of it. It has three registers, vernacular speech, formal speech and the formal literary and religious style called Chos-skad, which is used in religious and classical literature. The Tibetan script was reputedly devised in the seventh century by Thonmi Sambhota on the Devanagari model, after King Songtsen Gampo sent him to India to gather information on Buddhism, and it was first used to write Tibetan translations of Buddhist texts. Tibetan literature is mainly concerned with Buddhist themes, with works translated from Sanskrit and Chinese beside original writings, and it also includes works about the Bon religion, which pre-dates Buddhism in Tibet.