Tangut (also Xixia or Hsi-Hsia) is an ancient northeastern Tibeto-Burman language once spoken in the Tangut Empire, also known as Western Xia dynasty. By some linguists it is classified as one of the Qiangic languages, among which one also finds Qiang and rGyalrong. It is distantly related to Tibetan and Burmese, and possibly also to Chinese.
Tangut was the official language of the Tangut empire (known in Tibetan as Mi-nyag and in Chinese as Xi X...
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Tangut (also Xixia or Hsi-Hsia) is an ancient northeastern Tibeto-Burman language once spoken in the Tangut Empire, also known as Western Xia dynasty. By some linguists it is classified as one of the Qiangic languages, among which one also finds Qiang and rGyalrong. It is distantly related to Tibetan and Burmese, and possibly also to Chinese.
Tangut was the official language of the Tangut empire (known in Tibetan as Mi-nyag and in Chinese as Xi Xia 西夏), inhabited by the Tangut people, which obtained its independence from the Chinese Song dynasty at the beginning of the 11th century. Tangut Empire was annihilated when Genghis Khan invaded in 1226.
The Tangut language has its own script, namely the Tangut script. Occasionally, for religious documents, the Tangut language was written in Tibetan script.
The latest text (inscription of Buddhist dharani) that can be found written in the Tangut language dates to 1502, which means that the language was still in use three hundred years after...
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