Resumen
Updating dialect maps requires extensive language surveys. Geographic methods can be applied to identify relatively stable boundaries of dialect and subdialect areas, allowing language surveys to focus on boundaries that may change and thereby reduce survey costs. Certain scholars have pointed out that the watershed boundary can be employed as the boundary of Tibetan dialect areas. This paper adds that the lowest-grade road breakpoint line and no-man?s-land boundary can also be used as essential indicators for determining stable (sub)dialect area boundaries. Combined with the revised First Law of Geography and the method of superposition analysis of geographic elements, this study identifies indicators that affect the stability of the Tibetan (sub)dialect area boundaries and evaluates the stability of each boundary segment. Due to the particularity of the study area, most Qinghai?Tibet Plateau (Chinese part) (sub)dialect area boundaries are stable. In addition, boundary inaccuracies caused by defects in the distribution of language survey samples can be identified by geographic approaches.