Transliteration of Lhotshampa Names in Bhutanese Official Records

The transliteration of Lhotshampa names in Bhutanese official records refers to a pattern, widely reported within the resettled Lhotshampa diaspora, in which ethnic Nepali personal and family names appear on Bhutanese state-issued documents — passports, Citizenship Identity Cards, census registers, school certificates, land records and No Objection Certificates — in spellings that diverge from how the same individuals and families render their names in Devanagari and in standard romanised Nepali used in Nepal, India and the wider Nepali-speaking world.

Diaspora members describe a recognisable set of distortions: short vowels flattened or re-heard and rewritten, aspirated consonants softened, sibilants collapsed, and final consonants shifted to phonetically adjacent sounds. A name spelled one way in Devanagari and in standard romanised Nepali can arrive from a Bhutanese state office — on a passport, a Citizenship Identity Card or a school certificate — in a measurably different romanised form. Because the distortions follow a consistent phonetic pattern rather than random spelling drift, community members have long read them as evidence that the romanised forms were produced from spoken input by a clerk working in a different phonological system, rather than copied faithfully from Devanagari writing.

The phenomenon is well known inside the community but is sparsely documented in published research. No peer-reviewed linguistic study of the Nepali-to-Dzongkha-to-Latin transliteration chain specific to Bhutanese state documents is known to exist. This article assembles what the community has reported, what the available secondary literature touches on, and where the evidence gap lies.

Background: Nepali naming in the pre-expulsion era

Nepali-speaking communities had been settled in southern Bhutan since at least the late nineteenth century, and the government of Bhutan actively encouraged Nepali migration in the early twentieth century to clear forest and develop agriculture in the southern lowlands.^[1] Within these communities, names followed standard South Asian Hindu naming conventions: a given name often drawn from Sanskrit or Nepali religious vocabulary, paired with a hereditary surname denoting caste or clan — Sharma, Subedi, Adhikari, Acharya, Dahal, Ghimire, Khatiwada, Dulal, Basnet, Rizal, Bhattarai, Pokhrel, Chhetri, Gurung, Tamang, Limbu, Rai and Magar among the most common.

These names were written in Devanagari at home, in temple registers and in correspondence within the community. When written in the Latin alphabet — for school certificates, government records or correspondence with India — they followed the romanisation conventions of standard Nepali, which preserve the aspirated and retroflex consonants of the underlying Sanskrit-derived phonology (bh, dh, gh, jh, kh, sh, ch).

The Bhutanese state, however, operated in Dzongkha, a language written in the Tibetan uchen script. Dzongkha phonology and orthography handle the South Asian aspirated series differently from Devanagari, and the romanisation schemes Bhutanese clerks were trained in — derived from Tibetan transliteration practice — were never designed to carry Nepali sounds across to the Latin alphabet without loss.

The pattern of discrepancy

Diaspora members describe a small set of recurring distortions when Nepali names are written into Bhutanese state forms in romanised Latin script. The pattern is best understood at the level of phonemes rather than as a list of fixed name pairs:

Aspirated consonants flattened. The aspirated series bh, dh, gh, jh, kh in Devanagari is regularly reduced to its plain counterpart in Bhutanese romanised forms, so Bh- becomes B-, Dh- becomes D-, and so on. A clerk listening to a Nepali speaker pronounce an aspirate, then writing it in a Tibetan-trained ear, will tend to drop the breath.
The sibilant sh reduced to s. Nepali surnames built on श (sha) — such as Sharma and Shrestha — are routinely flattened to S- forms in romanised Bhutanese records, losing the distinction between the Nepali sha (श) and sa (स).
Short vowels rewritten. The Nepali short i is often re-heard and re-spelled by a Dzongkha-speaking clerk as a short e, and the Nepali short a is often dropped or rewritten as e or o. The result is that a consistently spelled Devanagari given name can arrive in romanised Bhutanese records with its vowels sitting one or two positions away from standard Nepali romanisation.
Final d shifted to r. A word-final d in a Nepali surname can appear as r in Bhutanese romanised forms. This particular shift is the one community members most often single out as evidence that the result is not a competent transliteration of the Devanagari original but a phonetic re-hearing by a clerk working from spoken rather than written input.
Conjunct consonants simplified. Nepali clusters such as shr-, chh-, and jny- are typically reduced to single consonants in the Latin form, so Shrestha may appear as Sresta or Srestha.

None of these distortions occur if a name written in Devanagari is romanised by a Nepali speaker using standard scholarly or official Nepali transliteration. They emerge specifically when the chain runs Devanagari to spoken Nepali to a Dzongkha-speaking clerk's ear to a Tibetan-trained Latin convention. The community's claim is that this is the chain that produced the names on their Bhutanese passports.

Mechanisms: transliteration chain, bureaucratic drift, and the 1988 census

The transliteration chain

The most innocent reading of the phenomenon is that it is the predictable side-effect of running a name through three different scripts and two different phonological systems with no Nepali-trained intermediary at any step. Bhutanese state forms were filled in by clerks whose linguistic training was in Dzongkha and English, not Nepali. A name spoken aloud by a southern Bhutanese applicant, written down by a clerk used to Tibetan-script orthography, and then romanised for an English-language passport, will accumulate distortions at each transition.

Bureaucratic drift over time

Once a particular spelling is fixed on a birth certificate, school certificate or land record, it tends to cascade. A child whose name appears one way on a primary school register is likely to see that same spelling reproduced — and sometimes drifted further — on every subsequent document. Families who were able to compare documents from different decades have reported that the same name is spelled in two or three different ways across the records of one household.

The 1988 census and the post-1985 citizenship regime

Diaspora testimony places particular weight on the 1988 census of southern Bhutan, the operation that, under the framework of the Bhutanese Citizenship Act 1985, reclassified tens of thousands of Lhotshampa as "non-nationals" and that immediately preceded the early-1990s expulsions.^[2] Census enumerators in the south were typically ethnic Ngalop or Sharchop officials drawn from the central administration. Several diaspora accounts describe the census moment as the point at which a family's name was recorded into the state's books in an unfamiliar form, and frame that recording as part of a broader experience of having one's identity rewritten by the state.

Whether the distortion was an unintended side-effect of an administration that did not employ Nepali-literate clerks, or a deliberate component of the broader assimilation drive associated with Driglam Namzha and the "One Nation, One People" rhetoric of the late 1980s, remains an open question. The community's reading is that the two cannot easily be separated: even if no individual clerk acted with intent, the absence of any Nepali-language quality control during a period when the state was actively narrowing the space for Nepali culture amounted, in its effects, to a form of administrative erasure.

Documentation and evidence

Published documentation of the surname-distortion phenomenon is thin. The two principal scholarly works on the Lhotshampa experience — Michael Hutt's Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan (Oxford University Press, 2003) and the broader literature anchored by the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research — address the 1988 census, the citizenship regime and the cultural-policy environment in detail, but do not focus on the romanisation of names on documents as a discrete object of study.^[3]

The 2007 Human Rights Watch report Last Hope: The Need for Durable Solutions for Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal and India documents the 2005 census, the F1–F7 citizenship classification system and the issuance of new identity cards in southern Bhutan, but does not address name spellings on those cards.^[1]

The most directly relevant published source is a 2021 SAPIENS essay by Kate Ruder, drawing on the work of anthropologists Kathryn Stam (SUNY Polytechnic, Utica) and Christopher Nelson (in Fort Worth), which discusses how the resettled Bhutanese Nepali community uses naming as a strategic and political act and how names function as a site at which dominant powers have sought to differentiate this community from those around it.^[4] The essay does not catalogue specific document spellings but situates the broader question of names within the experience of a community whose identity has been repeatedly rewritten by states.

Beyond these, the evidence is largely community-held: diaspora oral histories, family documents preserved through the camps and resettlement, and informal community knowledge. The Bhutan News Service-led Bhutanese Refugee Oral History Project, deposited in 2021 with the Smithsonian's Asian Pacific American Center, has begun to collect such material in a form accessible to outside researchers.^[5]

Parallel with place-name renaming

The surname phenomenon is the human-level parallel of a process that is far better documented at the geographical level. Between the 1950s and the late 1990s the Bhutanese state systematically replaced Nepali-origin place names across the southern dzongkhags with Dzongkha names, in waves that culminated in the 1996–97 romanisation standardisation. This process is covered in detail at renaming of places in southern Bhutan.

The two processes share a logic: in each case, names belonging to a Nepali-language cultural world were rewritten by an administration operating in Dzongkha, in ways that diaspora communities and human rights observers have read as part of the same broader pattern of cultural erasure that ran alongside the enforcement of Driglam Namzha and the expulsions of the early 1990s. They differ in evidentiary status. The place-name renaming is documented in printed gazettes, in field reports by Bhutan Watch and the Lhotshampa exile press, and increasingly in scholarly work; the surname phenomenon is mostly held in the memory of the families it affected.

Impact on the resettled diaspora

When Lhotshampa refugees were processed in the camps in eastern Nepal by UNHCR, and again by the International Organization for Migration for the third-country resettlement programme that began in 2007, the name on the identity document a refugee carried out of Bhutan typically became the name on every downstream record. UNHCR registration cards, IOM travel documents and the Form I-94 issued at US ports of entry all carried forward the spelling that the Bhutanese state had originally fixed. For many families, a name that had been written one way at home in Devanagari for generations became, on paper in the United States, Australia, Canada, Norway or the United Kingdom, the romanised Bhutanese form.

Families on arrival faced a choice. Some accepted the official spelling because changing it through a court was expensive, slow and entailed amending school records, social security numbers, driver's licences and credit histories. Others changed the name back at the point of naturalisation: in the United States, an applicant for citizenship may request a legal name change from the federal court administering the Oath of Allegiance, and a sub-set of resettled Bhutanese have used this route to restore the standard Nepali spelling of their name.^[6] A consequence is that diaspora records — university rosters, professional directories, community organisations' newsletters — often carry both forms, sometimes for the same person.

Reclamation efforts

Since the mid-2010s, parts of the resettled Lhotshampa community in the United States and Australia have moved to reassert standard Nepali spellings of their names. The most common form this takes is parents giving their children names spelled the Nepali way from birth, so that the next generation enters US, Canadian or Australian school systems with names that match the Devanagari original. A smaller but growing group of adults have used the naturalisation moment to legally revert their own names. Community organisations occasionally publish informal guidance on how to spell common surnames in standard romanised Nepali, particularly when preparing programmes for cultural events or compiling community directories.

The reclamation effort sits alongside a broader generational shift documented by the SAPIENS essay and by community organisations such as the Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization: older refugees born in Bhutan are more likely to identify as Bhutanese and to carry the Bhutanese-document form of their name, while younger members of the community, born in the camps or in resettlement countries, are more likely to identify as Nepali and to use the Nepali spelling.^[4]

Research gap and the limits of current sources

The phenomenon described in this article rests, at present, more on community testimony than on published research. There are several specific gaps that future work could address:

No published linguistic study has reconstructed the Nepali-to-Dzongkha-to-Latin transliteration chain that produced the spellings on Bhutanese state documents during the 1980s and early 1990s. Such a study would need access to the Bhutanese romanisation conventions in use at the time and to a corpus of paired documents (a Devanagari original and a Bhutanese romanised version).
No catalogue of documented name pairs has been published. The Bhutanese Refugee Oral History Project is one of the few research vehicles positioned to collect such material with the consent of the families involved, but as of 2026 no compiled findings on names have been released.
The Bhutanese state has not published — and is unlikely to publish — its internal transliteration manuals from the relevant period. This means the deliberate-versus-incidental question may never be settled from official documents alone.
Bhutan-based media (Kuensel, BBS, The Bhutanese) have not, to our knowledge, covered the phenomenon. Given a press environment in which the Lhotshampa expulsions and their consequences remain politically sensitive and largely undiscussed in domestic news, this absence is itself an artefact worth noting.

Within those limits, the community's testimony is consistent across families, across resettlement countries and across decades, and it is consistent at the level of phoneme-by-phoneme distortion with what one would predict from the structural mismatch between Nepali and Dzongkha phonology under a non-Nepali-trained clerical regime. Further documentation is needed; further documentation is also straightforward to produce, requiring only the systematic collection of paired family records by community organisations or sympathetic researchers.