The rubric Nam language has been used to describe an undeciphered language preserved in Tibetan transcription

Tibetan script

The Tibetan alphabet is an abugida of Indic origin used to write the Tibetan language as well as the Dzongkha language, Denzongkha, Ladakhi language and sometimes the Balti language. The printed form of the alphabet is called uchen script while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday...

 in a number of Dunhuang manuscript fragment currently held at the British Library

British Library

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...

 and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France

Bibliothèque nationale de France

The is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...

.

According to Ikeda, the research of F. W. Thomas

F. W. Thomas

Frederick William Thomas was an Indologist and Tibetologist. He studied Sanskrit under the influential Orientalist Edward Byles Cowell at Cambridge. He was a librarian at the India Office Library between 1898 and 1927. Subsequently he was appointed the Boden professor of Sanskrit at Oxford...

, published in 1948, concluded that Nam "was one of the old Qiang spoken around the Nam mountain range near Koko nor in Qinghai province" and associated with a country called Nam tig mentioned in some historical records. However, Ikeda further states that Thomas' conclusions were widely criticised afterward.http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/wadict/icstll41/abstracts/Ikeda_conf_abtract.doc