The Dhimal are an ethnic minority group of some 20 000 people in the southeastern part of Nepal
and adjacent parts of India. Their language is linguistically related to the family of
Sino-Tibetan languages. They are one of the 59 recognized indigenous groups who lived on what
is today Nepali soil long before the Indo-Aryans arrived with their Hindu culture and caste
system constituting the ethnic majority group in Nepal today. In Linguistics and Cultural
Anthropology very little is known about the ethnic group of the Dhimals. The author descends
from the Dhimal community himself and has presented a dissertation with a wealth of valuable
linguistic and ethnographic data. This massive work is likely to become a standard work on the
Dhimal community not only in linguistic terms but also with respect to Cultural Anthropology.
