Lhasa Tibetan (), or Standard Tibetan, or Bhodi skad (བོད་སྐད་) by the natives is the Tibetan dialect spoken by educated people of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. It is an official Tibetan of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. In the traditional "three-branched" classification of Tibetic languages, the Lhasa dialect belongs to the Central Tibetan branch (the other two being Khams Tibetan and Amdo Tibetan). In terms of mutual intelligibility, speakers of Khams Tibetan are able to communicate at a basic level with Lhasa Tibetan, while Amdo speakers cannot. Both Lhasa Tibetan and Khams Tibetan evolved to become tonal and do not preserve the word-initial consonant clusters, which makes them very far from Classical Tibetan, especially when compared to the more conservative Amdo Tibetan. Registers Like many languages, Lhasa Tibetan has a variety of language registers: (Wylie: , literally "demotic language"): the vernacular speech. (Wylie: , "honorifics or deference, courtesy"): the formal spoken style, particularly prominent in Lhasa. (Wylie: , literally "letters language" or "literary language"): the written literary style; may include below. (Wylie: , literally "doctrine language" or "religious language"): the literary style in which the scriptures and other classical works are written. Grammar Syntax and word order Tibetan is an ergative language. Grammatical constituents broadly have head-final word order: adjectives generally follow nouns in Tibetan, unless the two are linked by a genitive particle objects and adverbs precede the verb, as do adjectives in copular clauses a noun marked with the genitive case precedes the noun which it modifies demonstratives and numerals follow the noun they modify Numerals Unlike many other languages of East Asia and especially Chinese, another Sino-Tibetan language, there are no numeral auxiliaries or measure words used in counting in Tibetan although words expressive of a collective or integral are often used after the tens, sometimes after a smaller number. In scientific and astrological works, the numerals, as in Vedic Sanskrit, are expressed by symbolical words. Writing system Tibetan is written with an Indic script, with a historically conservative orthography that reflects Old Tibetan phonology and helps unify the Tibetan-language area. It is also helpful in reconstructing Proto Sino-Tibetan and Old Chinese. Wylie transliteration is the most common system of romanization used by Western scholars in rendering written Tibetan using the Latin alphabet (such as employed on much of this page), while linguists tend to use other special transliteration systems of their