Maithili language (मैथिली, মৈথিলী, Maithilī) is spoken in the eastern region of India and South-eastern region of Nepal. The native speakers of Maithili reside in Bihar,Jharkhand,parts of West Bengal and South-east Nepal. The cultural and linguistic centers of Maithili in Bihar are the districts of Madhubani, Supaul, Araria, Darbhanga, Sitamarhi, Saharsa, Begusarai, Muzaffarpur, Sheohar, Samastipu
r, and Vaishali . Maithili is also spoken in the Terai region of Nepal, mainly in Narayani Zone, Janakpur Zone, Koshi Zone, and Sagarmatha Zone of Nepal. It is the second largest spoken language of Nepal (around 12%).[1]
Linguists have classified Maithili as one of the Indo-Aryan languages.[2] It is an offshoot of the Indo-Aryan languages, which are part of the Indo-Iranian, a branch of the Indo-European languages. Linguists consider Maithili to be an Eastern Indic language, and thus different from Hindi, which is Central Indic in origin. According to the 2001 census in India, 12,179,122 people speak Maithili, but some[who?] have argued that the number of Maithili speakers is much higher. In 2003, Maithili was included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which allows the language to be used in education, government, and other official contexts. Maithili has a rich literary and cultural heritage. It had been believed that the language spoken in Bihar (Maithili) was a corrupt form of Hindi until the Maithili grammar appeared in the year 1880–81. Rudolf Hoernle published a Grammar of the Eastern Hindi from London in 1880 and compared with the other Gaudian Languages. In this Grammar, Dr. Hoernle recognized Maithili as a dialect distinct from Hindi. He was able to give some specimens of its grammatical forms, but no published materials were then available. Beames (1872/reprint 1966: 84-85), considered Maithili as a dialect of Bengali. Grierson, however, adopted the notional term "Bihari" language for the language used in Bihar; it has since been shown to be a misnomer for Maithili.[3]
The mis-classification by early linguists led to language politics in respect of Maithili.[4]
Maithili is derived from Avahattha, the Maithil Apabhramsha, which is derived from Magadhi Apbhramsha. [5] Maithili was traditionally written in the Maithili script (also known by the names Tirhuta ,i.e., Mithilakshar) and Kaithi script. The ISO of Unicode Technical Committee has approved the encoding of Kaithi and Tirhuta scripts. Nowadays, Devanagari script is most commonly used. An effort is underway to preserve the Maithili script and to develop it for use in digital media by encoding the script in the Unicode standard, for which proposals have been submitted by Sh. Anshuman Pandey (now it has been approved by the ISO, the Unicode Technical Committee).[6][7][8]
The term Maithili comes from Mithila, which was an independent state in ancient times. Mithila is important in Hindu mythology, since it is regarded as the birth place of Goddess Sita, the daughter of King Janak of Mithila, who eventually gets married to Lord Rama. The most famous literary figure in Maithili is the poet Vidyapati. He is credited for raising the importance of 'people's language', i.e. Maithili, in the official work of the state by influencing the Maharaja of Darbhanga with the quality of his poetry. The state's official language used to be Sanskrit, which distanced common people from the state and its functions. The name Maithili is also one of the names of Sita, the consort of Rama.
