West-Himalayic

Limbu is a Kiranti language of the Sino-Tibetan family, spoken east of the Arun River in eastern Nepal, Sikkim and the Darjeeling hills. The Limbu people call themselves Yakthung and their speech Yakthungpan; of its four main dialects Phedape is the most widely understood.

Limbu has its own writing system: tradition credits a ninth-century Limbu king with an early script, while the surviving Limbu or Sirijanga script was designed around 1700–1717 under Buddhist influence in Sikkim, drawing features from Tibetan and Devanagari.

After the Gorkha conquest of the Limbu hills in the mid-eighteenth century the use of the alphabet was discouraged and Nepali became the language of literacy, so that many Limbu writings came to be recorded in Devanagari instead.