How to Type Tibetan

Wylie is a way of writing Tibetan with ordinary English letters. Each Tibetan letter has a matching Latin letter (or a short pair of letters). You type those, and your computer turns them into Tibetan script.

It is named after Turrell Wylie, who published the system in 1959 so that scholars could write Tibetan on a typewriter. It is still the most common way to type Tibetan on a computer.

Treat Wylie with caution. It follows the spelling, not the sound. If you read Wylie out loud as if it were English, you will not be speaking Tibetan.

So bod is how བོད is spelled. Many people say it more like “pö.” It is a way to type the written form, not a guide to pronunciation.

A Mac already includes a Wylie keyboard. You only need to switch it on.

1. Open System Settings (on older Macs this is called System Preferences).
2. Go to Keyboard, then Input Sources. You may need to click Edit first.
3. Click the + button.
4. Scroll to Tibetan and choose Tibetan — Wylie. (Tibetan — EWTS is a close cousin. Either will work for everyday typing.)
5. Click Add.

To switch keyboards, click the icon in the menu bar at the top of the screen — it often looks like a flag or a character — and choose Tibetan. On many Macs the Globe key (next to the space bar) also switches. When you want English again, switch back the same way.

Windows can type Tibetan, but the keyboard it includes is not Wylie. It is a Tibetan-script layout, with letters in different places from an English keyboard. That is fine if you already know it. For Wylie, the usual path is a free program called Keyman.

If you want Wylie

1. Go to keyman.com and install Keyman.
2. In Keyman, add a Tibetan keyboard. Search for EWTS or Wylie — Extended Wylie (EWTS) is the one most people use.
3. Switch to it with Windows + Space, or click the language icon on the taskbar.

If you only need Tibetan letters

1. Open Settings → Time & language → Language & region.
2. Click Add a language, search for Tibetan, and install it.
3. Switch with Windows + Space.

Phones usually do not use Wylie. They give you a Tibetan keyboard, and you tap the letters themselves. That is the easier path on a small screen.

On an iPhone, stacks do not form by themselves — you tap a stack symbol between the letters. The next section covers that. If you specifically want Wylie on a phone, Keyman also makes an iOS and Android app. Most people prefer the built-in Tibetan keyboard.

Once the Wylie keyboard is on, these are the habits that matter most:

• Type a space for the ཚེག (་), the mark between syllables.
• The vowel a is already there — you do not type it. ka and k both make ཀ. Type i, u, e, or o after the letter for the other vowels.
• On a computer, stacked letters are typed in order, left to right as they are spelled: bkra becomes བཀྲ. The keyboard builds the stack for you when the combination is a normal Tibetan one.
• A single apostrophe is a འ.
• Type / for a ཤད (།).

On a computer, ordinary stacks take care of themselves. Type the letters in spelling order — prefix, superscript, root, subscript — and the keyboard builds the stack when the combination is a normal Tibetan one.

On a phone

On an iPhone the Tibetan keyboard does not stack automatically. You type a letter, then tap the stack key — the one with a downward arrow — then the next letter. Repeat the stack key for each letter that should join the stack. (Android keyboards vary; some stack on their own, some use a similar key.)

Sanskrit and unusual stacks

Standard Tibetan stacks follow the usual spelling rules, and the keyboard handles them. Sanskritized Tibetan and other non-standard stacks use extra conventions. This is the reference we use for those:

THL Extended Wylie — Tibetan and Himalayan Library

A keyboard puts Tibetan letters on the screen. A font is what makes those letters look like Tibetan handwriting — the right shapes, the stacks sitting in the right place.

The font this community uses for practice texts is Jomolhari. This site uses it too. If you install it on your computer and choose it in your document, what you type will match what other people are looking at.

On that page, click Get font and then Download all. You will get a zip file. Open it and find the .ttf file inside.