Maithili (मैथिली Maithilī) is a language spoken in the eastern part of India, mainly in the Indian state of Bihar and in the eastern Terai region of Nepal. It is an offshoot of the Indo-Aryan languages which are part of the Indo-Iranian, a branch of the Indo-European languages. Linguists consider Maithili to be an Eastern Indic language, and thus a different language from Hindi, which is Central Indic in origin. According to the 2001 census in In...
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Maithili (मैथिली Maithilī) is a language spoken in the eastern part of India, mainly in the Indian state of Bihar and in the eastern Terai region of Nepal. It is an offshoot of the Indo-Aryan languages which are part of the Indo-Iranian, a branch of the Indo-European languages. Linguists consider Maithili to be an Eastern Indic language, and thus a different language from Hindi, which is Central Indic in origin. According to the 2001 census in India, 12,179,122 people speak the Maithili language, but various organizations have strongly argued that the actual number of Maithili speakers is much more than the official data suggests. In times, Maithili has been considered a "dialect" of both Hindi and Bengali but thanks to an active movement calling for official status for the language, in 2003 it was included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which now allows the language to be used in education, government, and other official contexts. Maithili has a very rich literary...
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