Magahi

Magahi is one of the three commonly recognized principal languages under the rubric of Bihari languages, Bhojpuri and Maithili being the other two. From the time of Grierson’s Survey (Grierson 1903–28), these languages have been assumed to represent one branch of an Eastern group of languages, namely, the Māgadhī group of the Middle Indo-Aryan, which includes Bangla, Asamiya, and Oriya. This view has generally been subscribed to by many scholars including Chatterji (1926) and Katre (1968). More recently, though, other scholars, such as Cardona (1974) and Jeffers (1976), have argued for a modified sub-grouping. Cardona attaches it to the Central group with Eastern Hindi and Western Hindi; Jeffers goes a step further and would prefer to posit a Bihari subgroup itself within New Indo-Aryan, independent of the Hindi languages on the one hand, and the Bangla languages on the other. At any rate, the speakers of Magahi, and other Bihari languages, have a sense of identity and a great deal of cultural affinity with the Hindi group in various ways. Very often they will identify their language as Hindi in response to census questions, thereby skewing the figures for the speakers of the language. Hindi is the formal language of the region, used in schools and law courts. Magahi today uses the Devanagari script borrowed directly from Hindi in place of the Kaithi script used earlier. Both in vocabulary and phonology, it has a greater alignment with Eastern Hindi (in addition to the inevitable lexical borrowing from the formal, administrative, and literary varieties of Western Hindi as the state language). It is essentially in morphology that it has some crucial affinity with Bangla and the Eastern group, though it has Eastern flavours in some aspects of phonology too. Within the Bihari group itself, from all accounts, Magahi and Maithili are closer together forming an eastern branch of the Bihari as opposed to Bhojpuri as its western branch.