A Sociolinguistic Study of Maithili
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Linguistics
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.
Description
Keywords
Maithili language, Multilingualism