ABSTRACT
Maithili, a descendant of the Māgadhī is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. According to an estimate (Davis 1973:316), it is spoken by approximately 21 million people in the eastern and northern regions of the Bihar State of India and the southeastern plains, known as the tarāī, of Nepal. Short of carrying out a new linguistic survey of Bihar, it is not easy to ascertain the exact number of speakers of Maithili in contemporary Bihar. Current censuses of India tend to underreport the figure for Maithili—Maithili being erroneously viewed as a dialect of Hindi, or of a spurious language called Bihari. For example, the 1961 census figure of less than 5 million (4,982,615) Maithili speakers in Bihar seems grossly inaccurate when compared with the figure of more than 9 million (9,389,376) given by Sir George Abraham Grierson as early as 1891 (Brass 1974:64). In a guesstimate of the raw 1971 census figure arrived at by adding up the population of the districts of Purnea, Saharsa, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, Bhagalpur, Monghyr (half) and Santhal Pargana (half), G. Jha (1974:4–6) argues that around 23 million (22,998,706) people speak Maithili in Bihar. Adding up the Nepal 1971 census figure of 1,327,242 Maithili speakers to the population of Maithili speakers of Bihar, a total of more than 24 million (24,325,948) persons may be said to speak Maithili in India and Nepal. In a survey of the 50 most-spoken languages in the world, carried out by Grimes (1996:588) and reported on the Internet (https://infoplease.com/ipa/A0774735.html" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774735.html), Maithili ranks as the fortieth mostspoken language in the world and that it is spoken by 24.3 million ‘first language speakers’ in India and Nepal. The 2001 census of Nepal reports that a total of 2,797,382 persons (i.e. twice the number of speakers as of the 1971 census) speak Maithili natively in Nepal. No such census figure is available for Bihar in India. Nevertheless it may be safely asserted that currently there are about 30 million native speakers of Maithili in India and Nepal.
