Toto (language)

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Toto

Spoken in

India
speaker 20,000
Linguistic
classification

Sino-Tibetan languages

Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

sit

ISO 639-3

txo

Toto is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by around 20,000 people in India . Together with the Dhimal , Toto forms the small genetic unit Dhimal-Toto within the Bodic languages, which are a sub-unit of Sinotibetic.

Geographical distribution and dialects

Toto is spoken in the Indian state of West Bengal in the districts of Subhapara, Dhunchipara and Panchayatpara in the border area with Bhutan . The Toto people form a recognized Indian nationality, a Scheduled Tribe . The Toto language has no major dialect differences and direct communication with the Dhimal speakers is not possible because the two languages ​​- although closely related - have considerable differences in vocabulary.

Many Toto speakers also speak Hindi, some also Bengali and Nepali. The Devanagari and Bengali scripts are used to write the toto.

Linguistic properties

Like almost all Tibetan Burmese languages, Toto also has the sentence order SOV (subject-object-verb). The noun comes after its more detailed determiners such as genitive attribute, adjective attribute, number adjectives and demonstratives, post positions are used. Toto is not a tonal language .

literature

  • Christopher I. Beckwith (Ed.): Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages. Brill, Leiden / Boston / Cologne 2002.
  • Paul K. Benedict: Sino-Tibetan. A Conspectus. Cambridge University Press, 1972.
  • Scott DeLancey: Sino-Tibetan Languages. In: Bernard Comrie (Ed.): The World's Major Languages. Oxford University Press, 1990.
  • Austin Hale: Research on Tibeto-Burman Languages. Mouton, Berlin / New York / Amsterdam 1982.
  • James A. Matisoff: Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. University of California Press, 2003.
  • Anju Saxena (Ed.): Himalayan Languages. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2004.
  • Graham Thurgood, Randy J. LaPolla: The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Routledge, London 2003.
  • George Van Driem: Languages ​​of the Himalayas. Brill, Leiden 2001.