^China - Page 902 Chung Wah Chow, David Eimer, Caroline B Heller - 2009 "Language Most of the population in Qīnghǎi speaks a northwestern Chinese dialect similar to Gānsù huà (part of the Lan–Yin Mandarin family). Tibetans speak the Amdo or Kham dialects of Tibetan. It's possible to travel almost everywhere using ..."
^Thomas Laird, The Story of Tibet: Conversations With the Dalai LamaArchived 1 March 2020 at the Wayback Machine, p. 262 (2007) "At that time in my village", he said, "we spoke a broken Chinese. As a child, I spoke Chinese first, but it was a broken Xining language which was (a dialect of) the Chinese language." "So your first language", I responded, "was a broken Chinese regional dialect, which we might call Xining Chinese. It was not Tibetan. You learned Tibetan when you came to Lhasa." "Yes", he answered, "that is correct..."
^Politically incorrect tourismArchived 6 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine, The Economist, 26 February 2009: "When the Dalai Lama was born, the region, regarded by Tibetans as part of Amdo, a province of their historic homeland, was under the control of a Muslim warlord, Ma Bufang. The Dalai Lama and his family didn't learn Tibetan until they moved to Lhasa in 1939."