Introduction

Language names in the eastern Tibetosphere have long been discussed by academics as well as Tibetans. Naming both makes and marks a boundary between a designated object and others; language names thus produce specificity and separation. In this chapter, I focus on a variety of language names and their places with systems of language classifications in the eastern Tibetosphere. These names include those used by scholars and members of local communities: ‘Tibetic’, ‘logs skad ལོགས ་ སྐད་ ‘, ‘Minyag’, ‘Lamo’, and ‘Selibu’. In discussing these names, I explore how these labels operate as means for Tibetans to engage in recognition and bordering; I also examine how scholars working in this area have considered language names and how they might respond to Tibetan ways of recognising and labelling languages.

Linguists generally recognise a language by giving it an independent name, that is, a glottonym. Glottonyms can be considered as proper names in their meaning and function (see Zink, 1963; Katz, 1977; Van Langendonck, 2008). Numerous debates around glottonyms exist, because these labels are typically not uniformly determined, and several different names may be provided for a single language or a language group, as seen in the entries of the widely used linguistic reference work, the Ethnologue (Eberhard et al., 2019).