Nicolas Tournadre

Nicolas Tournadre is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris 8, a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Lacito), and was formerly Co-Director of the Tibetan language collection at the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library at the University of Virginia. During the past 15 years, he has spent more than three years on the Tibetan plateau conducting research and collecting data about the Tibetan language and its dialects. He is the founder of the association “Schools on the Roof of the World,” which has built four schools in Tibet and supports writers in the Tibet Autonomous Region as well as in Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures outside the TAR. Tournadre’s Manual of Standard Tibetan quickly became the foundational text for the Western study of the modern Tibetan language, and he has recently co-authored The Great Book of Tibetan Proverbs (with Françoise Robin, 2006).