Ladakhi sounds like this

We thought it worthwhile to dedicate a post to Ladakhi because many of the WLP students belong to the Ladakhi nation and speak one of more varieties of the language. Of course, in the WLP school, the women are learning "only" Hindi and English script, at least for now. On the other hand, children who attend the Himalyan Buddhist School (H.C.S.) in Gulabgarh also learn Bhoti, in addition to Hindi and English. How lucky they are to know so many languages!

Festival in Leh. Photo by Raul

But what is Ladakhi and where does this language come from? To answer this question, we've decided to share the information about Ladakhi contained in the Wikipedia; we couldn't have done a better job ourselves.

"The Ladakhi language (Tibetan: ལ་དྭགས་སྐད་, Wylie: La-dwags skad), now also called Bhoti, is the predominant language in the Ladakh region of the Jammu and Kashmir state of India, and is also spoken in Baltistan. Ladakhi is closely related to Tibetan, and the Ladakhi people share cultural similarities with Tibetans, including Tibetan Buddhism. 

Ladakhi has approximately 200,000 speakers in India, and perhaps 12,000 speakers in the Tibet region of China, mostly in the Changthang region. The language has several dialects including Ladakhi proper (also called Lehskat after the capital of Ladakh, Leh, where it is spoken), Shamskat, spoken to the northwest of Leh, Stotskat, spoken to the southeast in the Indus valley and Nubra, spoken in the north. The varieties spoken in Upper Ladakh and Zangskar have many features of Ladakhi and many other features of western dialects of Central Tibetan.

Ladakhi is usually written using Tibetan script with the pronunciation of Ladakhi being much closer to written Tibetan than most other Tibetan dialects."

In case you'd like to know what Ladakhi sounds like—at least a few consonant sounds from the language—we've included the short Keynote presentation below.

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