Maithili Language

Maithili Language

Maithili (मैथिली, মৈথিলী, Maithilī ) is spoken in the Mithila region of eastern Nepal and northern India. Linguists have classified Maithili as one of the Indo-Aryan languages. It is an offshoot of the Indo-Aryan languages, which is a branch of the Indo-European languages. Early Indo-Aryan languages (2500 BC to 500 BC) developed from Vedic Sanskrit to Laukik Sanskrit. Middle Indo-Aryan Languages (500 BC to 1000 AD) developed from Pali (early Prakrit, 500 BC to 100 BC) to Prakrit (middle Prakrit, 100 BC to 500 AD), Apbhramsha (neo Prakrit, 500 AD to 900 AD) and Avhattha (neo regional Prakrit, 900 AD to 1100 AD). From neo-Magadhi Prakrit and its variant Maithil Avahattha came Maithili language (1000 AD). It is in the category of Modern Indo-Aryan Language (1000 AD to till date). Linguists consider Maithili to be an Eastern Indic language.

According to the 2001 census in India, 12,179,122 people speak Maithili. Maithili has 35 million (2000) native speakers in the world. 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. It is the second most spoken language of Nepal (around 12%).

The first grammar of Maithili was written in 1880–81. A. F. 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. The mis-classification by early linguists led to language politics in respect of Maithili. Beames (1872/reprint 1966: 84-85) considered Maithili as a dialect of Bengali. Grierson, however, adopted the notional term "Bihari" for the language used in Bihar; it has since been shown to be a misnomer for Maithili.

Maithili is derived from Avahattha, the Maithil Apabhramsha, which is derived from Magadhi Apbhramsha.

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).

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 birthplace 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 (1350–1450), who wrote his poems in the language of the people, i.e., Maithili, at a time when state's official language used to be Sanskrit and Sanskrit was still being used as a literary language. The use of Maithili, instead of Sanskrit, in literature became more common after Vidyapati.