ABSTRACT
Bhojpuri is the westernmost member of the Eastern group of languages that Grierson (1927:5) chose to group together as deriving from Māgadha (and Māgadhi Prakrit) that includes not only the other Bihari languages but also Bangla, Asamiya, and Oriya. In fact, the term ‘Bihari’ was first used by Grierson (1883–87) to mean a single language, with Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili as its three dialects. Both Chatterji (1926) and Tiwari (1960) treat them as separate languages in which Magahi and Maithili are sub-grouped together separately from Bhojpuri, sharing, among other things, a rather complex system of verbal conjugation.
