Speakers of Tozhu Tuvan, like the other Tuvans, call themselves ty'va, tu'va; some older people use the phonetic versions tu'ga, tu'kha. It is known that the ethnonym dubo/tuba gave birth to the self-names of a number of peoples: Tofalars (to'fa, to'va), Northern Altaians and the Kachinsky clan of the Khakass (tuba), Tuvans of the Tsengel somon of Mongolia, Kök-Monchak of Mongolia and China (dy'va), Tsaatan Uyghurs (dukha) and the Uyghur-Uryankhay (tukha) of Mongolia.
According to the results of the All-Russian Population Census of 2010, the number of Tuvans in the Republic of Tyva is 249,299 people. The number of Tozhu Tuvans is 5% of the total number of Tuvans. In the census of 1931, there were 2,115 Tozhu; according to the census of 2002, this number increased to 4,335.
According to the census of 2010, the number of respondents who indicated their ethnicity as Tozhu Tuvans was 1,856 people. There is no statistical data on native speakers of the Tozhu Tuvans due to lack of such monitoring. In 1974, according to experts, there were more than 5 thousand speakers of the Tozhu dialect. Currently, their approximate number is indicated at around 1,500 people.