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, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne,
सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mai ...
,
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 mountainous ...
, 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 ...
of
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 fourt ...
,
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
''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for ...
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 Kira ...
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-Ko ...
.
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
Sir George Abraham Grierson (7 January 1851 – 9 March 1941) was an Irish administrator and linguist in British India. He worked in the Indian Civil Service but an interest in philology and linguistics led him to pursue studies in the languag ...
'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 w ...
'', and
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 ...
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 Himala ...
.
[Hodgson, Brian Houghton. 1880. ''Miscellaneous Essays relating to Indian Subjects'' (2 vols.). London: Trübner & Co.]
See also
*
Dhimalish comparative vocabulary list (Wiktionary)
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