Toto people

The Toto people are one of the world's smallest indigenous ethnic groups, living in a village of Totopara on India's border with Bhutan.

Anthropologists agree that the Toto culture and language is totally unique to the ethnic group, and is clearly distinguished from the neighbouring Rajbongshis, Koch, Mech or the Bhutanese Sharchop ethnic groups.

Toto language belongs to Tibeto-Burman family of sub-Himalayan group, as classified by Hodgson and Grierson.

A script was developed for the language by community elder Dhaniram Toto in 2015, and has seen limited but increasing use in literature, education, and computing; a proposal for encoding this script was accepted by the Unicode technical committee on October 8, 2019.

On the death of a spouse, the husband or wife must remain single for twelve months before he or she is free to remarry.

The Toto localities of the village are sub-divided into six segments - Panchayatgaon, Mandolgaon, Subbagaon, Mitranggaon, Pujagaon and Dumchigaon.