Toto Language
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Toto (
Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
: , Toto: ) is a
Sino-Tibetan 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. ...
language spoken on the border of
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 ...
and
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 ...
, by the tribal
Toto people The Toto is an isolated tribal group residing only in a small enclave called Totopara in the Alipurduar district of West Bengal, India. Totopara is located at the foot of the Himalayas just to the south of the borderline between Bhutan and West B ...
in Totopara, West Bengal along the border with
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 ...
. It is also spoken in Subhapara, Dhunchipara, and Panchayatpara hillocks on India-Bhutan border in
Jalpaiguri district Jalpaiguri district () is a district of the Indian state of West Bengal. The district was established in 1869 during British Raj. The headquarters of the district are in the city of Jalpaiguri, which is also the divisional headquarters of No ...
,
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 ...
(''
Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...
'').


Status

Toto is listed as a
critically endangered language An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead langu ...
by
UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
, with perhaps 1,000 speakers. However, most families in the community speak Toto at home. Most children learn Toto at home, although they use
Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
in school.
Anthropological Survey of India Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI) is the apex Indian government organisation involved in anthropological studies and field data research for human and cultural aspects, working primarily in the fields of physical anthropology and cultural ...
(AnSI) set out to conduct a study on language of the Toto tribe, whose population has dwindled to 1,536, they did not realize that the language is more endangered than the tribe itself. Researchers as well the members of the Toto community admit that the language is under threat and the influence of other languages, particularly Nepali and Bengali, is increasing day by day. The
Himalayan Languages Project The Himalayan Languages Project, launched in 1993, is a research collective based at Leiden University and comprising much of the world's authoritative research on the lesser-known and endangered languages of the Himalayas, in Nepal, China, Bhutan, ...
is working on the first grammatical sketch of Toto.


Phonology


Vowels

Toto consists of 25 segmental phonemes, of which 19 are consonants and six are vowels. The phonemes of this language are as follows: Vowels: there are six vowel phonemes in the Toto language. They can be classified horizontally into three as front unrounded, central unrounded and back rounded vowels and vertically as close, close-mid, open-mid and open. The following minimal pairs establish the phonetics status of the vowel: /i/~/u/ /Jiya/ 'rat' /Juya/ 'bird' /i/~/e/ /iŋ/ 'brother in-law' /eŋ/ 'ginger' /ciwa/ 'tear' /cewa/ 'cut' (cloth) /i/~/a/ /guJi/ 'owl' /guJa/ 'pocket' /nico/ 'fire' /naco/ 'two' /e/~/o/ /je/ 'grass' /jo/ 'breast' /e/~/a/ /lepa/ 'brain' /lapa/ 'jungle betel leaf' /kewa/ 'birth' /kawa/ 'sound' There are eight diphthongs realized in Toto. These are /ei/, /ai/, /oi/, /ui/, /əi/, /eu/, /au/ and /ou/. Diphthong /ui/ occurs in all positions, /eu/ occurs initial and medial positions, /ai/, /oi/, /əi/, and /ei/ occur medial and final positions. While /ou/ and /au/ occur only in the medial positions. Furthermore, with regard to consonants, Toto has an inventory of ten
obstruents An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well a ...
, eight of which are contrastive in voicing. Toto also distinguishes the voiceless obstruents /t/ and /p/ with its aspirated equivalents /tʰ/ and /pʰ/, respectively.


Consonants


Vocabulary

Below are some Toto words from van Driem (1995), who uses these words to suggest that Toto may be a Sal language.van Driem, George. 1995. ''The Ṭoṭo language of the Bhutanese duars''. Paper presented at ICSTLL 28. * 'to drink' * 'shoulder' * 'cooking pot' (second syllable), cf.
Dzongkha Dzongkha (; ) is a Sino-Tibetan language that is the official and national language of Bhutan. It is written using the Tibetan script. The word means "the language of the fortress", from ' "fortress" and ' "language". , Dzongkha had 171,080 n ...
'jug' * 'seed' * 'today' * 'moon' * 'fall' (cf.
Benedict Benedict may refer to: People Names *Benedict (given name), including a list of people with the given name *Benedict (surname), including a list of people with the surname Religious figures * Pope Benedict I (died 579), head of the Catholic Chu ...
's PTB 'dive, sink, drown') * 'big' (first syllable) * 'shit' * 'right' (vs. 'left') * 'stomach' (first syllable); the second syllable is cognate with Toto 'meat' * 'meat' * 'bamboo species' (first syllable), Nepali * 'paddy' * 'wing' * 'sun' * 'stand' * 'yesterday' * 'navel' * 'bring' * 'to shit' * 'sleep' * 'urine' * 'dog' * 'name' * 'horn' * 'flower' * 'snake' * 'stone' * 'tongue' * 'to dream' * 'ear' * 'eye' * 'fish' * 'body hair' * 'I' * 'sole of the foot' * 'pig' * 'thou' * 'tooth' * 'die' * 'eat' * 'be sweet, taste sweet' * 'mango' (suffix: ) * '
jackfruit The jackfruit (''Artocarpus heterophyllus''), also known as jack tree, is a species of tree in the fig, mulberry, and breadfruit family (Moraceae). Its origin is in the region between the Western Ghats of southern India, all of Bangladesh, ...
' (suffix: ) * 'kill' * 'dig' * 'egg' * 'sit, stay' * 'water' * 'tear' * 'spit' * 'rain' * 'blood' * 'milk' * 'buffalo' * 'come down, descend' * 'neck' * 'weave' * 'cry' * 'monkey' * 'mouse, rat'


Pronouns

The Toto personal pronouns are (van Driem 1995):


Numerals

The Toto numerals are (van Driem 1995): *


Writing system

An
alphabetic An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
script developed for the language by community elder and author, Dhaniram Toto, was published in 2015, and has seen limited but increasing use in literature, education, and computing; most significantly, the Toto alphabet was added to the
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
Standard in September, 2021. Prior to the publication of this script, Dhaniram Toto and other members of the community (whose literacy rate as per sample survey carried out in 2003 was just 33.64 per cent) penned books and poems in the
Bengali script Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
.


Unicode

The Toto alphabet was added to the
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
Standard in September, 2021 with the release of version 14.0. The Unicode block for Toto is U+1E290–U+1E2BF:


See also

* Dhimalish comparative vocabulary list (Wiktionary)


Notes


References

*Amitabha, S. (1993). Toto, Society and Change: A Sub-Himalayan Tribe of West Bengal. Firma KLM. *Basumatary, C. (2014). The Phonological Study of Toto Language. Language in India, 14:6, 59–84. Retrieved February 9, 2015, from http://languageinindia.com/june2014/chibiramtotophonology1.pdf *Chaudhuri, B. (1992). Tribal Transformation in India. New Delhi, India: Inter-India Publications. *Doherty, B. (2012, April 29). India's Tribal People Fast Becoming Lost for Words. Retrieved February 8, 2015, from http://www.smh.com.au/world/indias-tribal-people-fast-becoming-lost-for-words-20120429-1xted.html * *Mehrotra, R. (1974). Endangered Languages in India. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 105–114. Retrieved February 9, 2015, from https://web.archive.org/web/20111016074549/http://www.degruyter.de/journals/ijsl/detailEn.cfm *Perumalsamy P (2016) Toto Language LSI West Bengal Vol.I in the website of Office of the Registrar General India, New Delhi http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-documents/lsi/lsi_wb/5TOTO.pdf *Singh, S. (2014, August 1). Toto Language More Endangered Than Tribe. Retrieved February 8, 2015, from http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/kolkata/toto-language-more-endangered-than-tribe/article6270931.ece *van Driem, G., & Bronkhorst, J. (2001). Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region Containing an Introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language (pp. 559–760). Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Pub. *van Driem, G. (2007). South Asia and Middle East. In C. Moseley (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages (pp. 289–348). London and New York: Routledge. *van Driem, George. 1995. ''The Ṭoṭo language of the Bhutanese duars''. Paper presented at ICSTLL 28.


External links


India's Tribal People Fast Becoming Lost for WordsAbout Toto PeopleAtlas of the World's Languages in DangerWorld Oral Literature ProjectEthnologue: Languages of the World, 16th Edition (2009)Language Kiranti_languages
Languages_of_India.html" ;"title="Kiranti languages">Language Kiranti languages
Languages of India">Kiranti languages">Language Kiranti languages
Languages of India Languages of Bhutan Endangered languages of India