Maithili
| Maithili (मैथिली) | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
India ( Bihar ), Nepal | |
| speaker | 17 million | |
| Linguistic classification |
||
| Official status | ||
| Official language in | India , Bihar State | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
May |
|
| ISO 639-3 |
May |
|
Maithili ( मैथिली , maithilī) is an Indo-Aryan language and belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is also counted among the group of Bihari languages , with the other members of which it is closely related.
Maithili is mainly widespread in the north of the Indian state of Bihar , where it is also recognized as an official language, and in the adjacent areas of the eastern Terai in Nepal . In the 2011 Indian census, 13.6 million people said Maithili was their first language. According to the 2011 census, around 3.1 million Maithili native speakers live in Nepal. The language takes its name from the historical Mithila region . She used to use her own script ( Maithili script , Mithilakshar , Tirhuta , Kaithi ), which was similar to the Bengali script . Today Maithili is written in Devanagari .
Maithili literature can look back on almost 800 years of history. Its most outstanding representative is the poet Vidyapati , who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries. In the 19th century, however, the writing tradition was largely lost, so that Maithili was little respected as a result. Even today, many Hindi nationalists regard it as merely a dialect of Hindi , and even native speakers, especially the upper class, see Hindi as the superior language. In recent times, however, Maithili has been generally upgraded through its recognition as an official language in Bihar (2003) and greater appreciation by Indian literary institutes such as the Sahitya Academy.
literature
- Colin P. Masica: The Indo-Aryan Languages (Cambridge Language Surveys). CUP, Cambridge 1991, ISBN 0-521-23420-4 .
- Subhadra Jhā: The Formation of the Maithili Language . Luzac, London 1958 (also dissertation, Patna University ).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Data on Language and Mother Tongue. Part A: Distribution of the 22 scheduled languages-India / States / Union Territories - 2011 census. (PDF) Census of India 2011
- ↑ National Population and Housing Census 2011 (National Report), p. 164. (PDF) Government of Nepal, Central Bureau of Statistics