The Dhimalish languages,

Dhimal The Dhimal or Dhemal(in Nepali:धिमाल) are an Kirati ethnic group residing in the eastern Terai of Nepal. They are a Sino-Tibetan-speaking ethnic group of the eastern Terai. They mainly reside in Morang and Jhapa districts of Nepal a ...

and Toto, are a small group of

Sino-Tibetan languages Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...

spoken in

Nepal Nepal (; ne, :ne:नेपाल, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne, सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in S ...

Bhutan Bhutan (; dz, འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, Druk Yul ), officially the Kingdom of Bhutan,), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is situated in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. A mountainou ...

, and the

Jalpaiguri division Jalpaiguri Division is one of the 5 divisions in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is the northernmost division of West Bengal. It is surrounded by Nepal on the western side, Bihar on South-Western side, Bhutan on the Northern side and Bangla ...

West Bengal West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fou ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

Classification

Hammarström, et al. note in Glottolog that Dhimalish is best considered to be a separate Sino-Tibetan branch rather than as a subgroup of Brahmaputran (Sal), and consider Dhimalish as failing to show sufficient Brahmaputran diagnostic vocabulary. Sotrug (2015) considers Dhimalish to be particularly closely related to the

Kiranti languages The Kiranti languages are a major family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Nepal and India (notably Sikkim, Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Kumai) by the Kirati people. External relationships George van Driem had formerly proposed that the Kir ...

rather than to the

Sal languages The Sal languages are a branch of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in northeast India, parts of Bangladesh, and Burma. Alternative names '' Ethnologue'' calls the group "Jingpho–Konyak–Bodo", while Scott DeLancey (2015) refers to it as "Bodo-K ...

. Grollmann & Gerber (2017) consider Lhokpu to have a particularly close relationship with Dhimal and Toto. Gerber & Grollmann (2018) group Dhimal, Toto, and Lhokpu within Central-Eastern Kiranti.

Comparative vocabulary

Sanyal (1973:77-81) provides a comparative word list of Toto from Sunder (1895) and George Abraham Grierson's ''

Linguistic Survey of India The Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) is a comprehensive survey of the languages of British India, describing 364 languages and dialects. The Survey was first proposed by George Abraham Grierson, a member of the Indian Civil Service and a linguist ...

'', and

from

Brian Houghton Hodgson Brian Houghton Hodgson (1 February 1800 or more likely 1801 – 23 May 1894) was a pioneer naturalist and ethnologist working in India and Nepal where he was a British Resident. He described numerous species of birds and mammals from the Hima ...

.Hodgson, Brian Houghton. 1880. ''Miscellaneous Essays relating to Indian Subjects'' (2 vols.). London: Trübner & Co.

References

* George van Driem (2001
''Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region.''
Brill: Boston * Sanyal, Charu Chandra. 1973. "The Totos: A sub-Himalayan tribe." In ''The Meches and the Totos'', 1-81. Darjeeling: University of North Bengal. {{Kiranti languages Kiranti languages Languages of India Languages of Nepal

Classification

Comparative vocabulary

See also

References