This is the site for the new Dege Dialect dictionary of Tibetan, launched in 2020!
The Tibetan literary (or written) language and its script have a long history, going back to the middle of the 7th century. There are many excellent dictionaries of the literary language which help the user master that genre of Tibetan.
The colloquial dialects of Tibetan vary significantly from the literary language however, and as these colloquial languages are not typically written down, there are very few dictionaries of the colloquial language. The few extant dictionaries of the colloquial dialects are in the Lhasa and Amdo dialects.
This is a dictionary of the Dege dialect (སྡེ་དགེ་སྐད་), which is a major dialect in the Kham (ཁམས་) cluster of dialects. The Dege dialect is a prestigious dialect, considered so because of its close relationship to literary Tibetan.
This dictionary is not intended to replace the literary language dictionaries. Its primary purpose is to aid non-native speakers of the Dege dialect to learn to speak this dialect. It uses the Tibetan script to write the language down, and the phonetic transcription and the recordings are there to aid the learner in pronouncing the words. Sometimes the words are written with non-standard spellings to reflect pronunciation, and in these cases a literary equivalent or explanation is given in square brackets […].
It is also hoped that this dictionary will contribute to the growing body of data gathered on colloquial Tibetan dialects and be useful in comparative studies of such.