A Sociolinguistic Study of Maithili

Abstract

This study presents a sociolinguistic description of Maithili in terms of its dialectal variations, language attitude, multilingualism, language choice and language contact. Maithili, belonging to Indo-Aryan language family, is a cross-border language spoken by a large number of people in the districts of south-eastern part of Nepal, viz., Morang, Sunsari, Saptari, Siraha, Dhanusha, Mahottari and Saralahi and, also in India. The number of Maithili speakers in Nepal is approximately 30, 92,530, which constitutes 11.7% of the country’s total population and ranks first in the Tarai and second (i.e., next to Nepali) in the national context (Census, 2011). This is a field-based study. The main goal of this study is to analyze the sociolinguistic situation of the Maithili language spoken in Nepal. It is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 presents major objectives of the study, literature review, significance and limitations of the study. Chapter 2 deals with the research methodology of the study. Chapter 3 and 4 look at the regional and social variations, respectively. Chapter 5 discusses the attitudes of the Maithili community towards their mother tongue and other languages. Chapter 6 analyzes multilingualism and language choice in Maithili. Chapter 7 examines language contact situation in Maithili. Chapter 8 presents summary and conclusions of the study. This study has revealed a number of interesting sociolinguistic features of the Maithili language. This language is extensively used in almost all the social domains in the Maithili speaking community. However, people sometimes switch to a language of wider communication according to their needs and contexts. Especially, they make mixed uses of Maithili, Nepali and Hindi in some contexts; however, educated speakers also tend to use English instead of mixed use of languages. Maithili shows regional and social variations. Such variations may be attested in the domains of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. In Maithili, there are mainly three regional dialects, viz., eastern, central and western. But in some contexts, this study has exhibited only two regional dialects, viz., eastern and western. There is 82% to 94% lexical similarity among the three dialects. Moreover, the lexical similarity percentages of the word list gleaned in the eastern dialect range from 84% to 90%. Such similarity percentages range from 83% to 90% in the central dialect whereas in the western dialect, the similarity percentages range from 86% to 93%. Similarly, there are mainly two social varieties, viz., Brahmin and Non-Brahmin, in the language. However, in some contexts, this study has found three social varieties: Brahmin, Non-Brahmin1 and Non-Brahmin2 as well. The forms of the language spoken by the three major social groups are mutually intelligible to each other. There is 82% to 92% lexical similarity among these social groups. Language attitude is very positive in the speech community. Honorificity is very complex in the Maithili language. It is very often used in the Brahmin variety whereas it is rarely found in Non-Brahmin (except in some high educated people) variety of the language. However, this study has rarely found high honorificity in the Brahmin variety as well. In the multilingual context of the Tarai region, the findings of the study may serve as references for the long term planning and development of the Maithili language. The annexes include map of Maithili speaking area of Nepal and India, distribution of Maithili speakers in Nepal, 405 wordlist, Basic Sentences, Sociolinguistic Questionnaire ‘A’, Sociolinguistic Questionnaire ‘B’, and the Maithili analyzed texts.