Among Asian languages, Tibetan is second only to Chinese in the depth of its historical record, with texts dating back as far as the eighth and ninth centuries, written in an alphabetic script that preserves the contemporaneous phonological features of the language. The Classical Tibetan Language is the first comprehensive description of the Tibetan language and is distinctive in that it treats the classical Tibetan language on its own terms rather than by means of descriptive categories appropriate to other languages, as has traditionally been the case. Beyer presents the language as a medium of literary expression with great range, power, subtlety, and humor, not as an abstract object. He also deals comprehensively with a wide variety of linguistic phenomena as they are actually encountered in the classical texts, with numerous examples of idioms, common locutions, translation devices, neologisms, and dialectal variations.

Tibetan Literature addresses the immense variety of Tibet's literary heritage. An introductory essay by the editors attempts to assess the overall nature of 'literature' in Tibet and to understand some of the ways in which it may be analyzed into genres. The remainder of the book contains articles by nearly thirty scholars from America, Europe, and Asia—each of whom addresses an important genre of Tibetan literature. These articles are distributed among eight major rubrics: two on history and biography, six on canonical and quasi-canonical texts, four on philosophical literature, four on literature on the paths, four on ritual, four on literary arts, four on non-literary arts and sciences, and two on guidebooks and reference works.

This English-Tibetan dictionary contains 16,000 main entries and subentries, a total of 45,000 lexical items. The dictionary is primarily oriented to spoken communication and was designed to be semantically sensitive, bridging the semantic gap between Tibetan and English. Tibetan terms corresponding to submeanings of English subterms are specified, and each entry in the dictionary includes both the Tibetan orthography and a phonemic notation to indicate pronunciation. Grammatical features are noted, and all examples of usage are presented with the romanization of the Tibetan and phonemic notation of the spoken forms. An introductory essay outlines the main features of Tibetan grammar. (MSE)