Taku is an obscure variety of Tibetan spoken at Sandagu Village in Luhua

Town of Heishui County in northern Sichuan. Situated in a remote borderland

between Amdo Tibetan and Northern Qiang, this previously unstudied Tibetan

variety is barely intelligible to speakers of the mainstream Tibetan dialects (in

particular Amdo and Khams) on first contact, owing to its unusual phonological,

grammatical, as well as lexical features. Examples of its phonological

peculiarities include glide ɻ realization of Written Tibetan (reminiscent of

Qiang) and the voiceless counterpart thereof ɻ̥ as reflex of Written Tibetan ,

abundance of central vowels, and lack of phonemic tone despite massive

syllable-canon reduction. In this talk, a selected number of phonetic and

phonological features of special interest for Tibetology and Sino-Tibetan

linguistics will be presented, with forays into their historical origins.