Kham, in all its varieties, is spoken primarily in the upper valleys of Rukum and Rolpa Districts of the Rapti Zone in Mid-Western Nepal (see map 1). A few thousand of the easternmost speakers spill over into the Nishi and Bhuji Khola regions in the western part of Baglung District, Dhaulagiri Zone. Only Sheshi, the southernmost dialect, is separated from the other dialects by populations of Nepali speakers. All other dialects are contiguous to one another, separated by uninhabited mountain barriers between eleven and thirteen thousand feet in altitude. (For more on geography, see §1.2.)

Language typology

Kham is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language of the Bodic branch exhibiting many of the areal features defined for the ‘Indospheric’ side of the family – a gross generalization for the westernmost TB languages. Such languages have been variously influenced in phonology and grammatical structure by prolonged contact with Indic languages (in contrast to the ‘Sinospheric’ TB languages of Southeast Asia).

Tonal patterns

Tone in Kham can be described as belonging to a ‘four-box’ system. Two binary oppositions, ‘voice register’ (modal and lax) and ‘melody’ (Tone-1 and Tone-2), intersect to form four contrastive tone patterns. The melody opposition clearly predates the register split and may correlate with Benedict's (1972) tones *A and *B for Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB). Voice register was superimposed later and now divides the pitch range of Tones 1 and 2 into an upper and lower range.