The Tibetan vocabulary is growing, as more modern words find a place in the 1,300-year-old language of the ethnic group that mainly lives on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Thanks to translators' efforts, Tibetans learned how to say "train" in their own language, megor, after the Qinghai-Tibet Railway opened on July 1, 2006. The line provides the first ever rail link between the autonomous region and the rest of China.

The list of new words that have crept into the Tibetan lexicon with modernization also includes "stock" (gengzi), "securities" (guinzi), "civil servant" (jishabpa) and "severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)" (miseiluocei).