Causes and effects of super-stratum language influence, with reference to Maithili

Maithili, the language of approximately 35 million peple in India and Nepal, is shrinking as it has a limited domain of use and almost all speakers of Maithili are bilingual. It has been said that if deep and prolonged bilingualism persists there will be two outcomes, either speakers of the less dom...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Indo-European studies 2013-10, Vol.4-1 (3-4), p.378-391
Main Author: Choudhary, P K
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
India
Indians
Indo-European languages
Language change
Language use
Linguistics
Maithili
Nepal
Phonology
Typological analysis
Vowel
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Summary:Maithili, the language of approximately 35 million peple in India and Nepal, is shrinking as it has a limited domain of use and almost all speakers of Maithili are bilingual. It has been said that if deep and prolonged bilingualism persists there will be two outcomes, either speakers of the less dominant language will shift to the second or the speakers of both languages will maintain their language. In the second situation the less dominant language will develop commonalities in structure with the first, becoming typologically very different from other sister languages. Because of their status, Hindi and Nepali have influenced Maithili in India and Nepal; due to substratum status Maithili has been converging with Hindi at all levels. In phonology, Maithili had short vowel 'a' that has been replaced with central vowel 'a' in modern Maithili. At the lexical level it is replacing its vocabulary; Maithili words like ciThThi 'letter', selai 'matchbox', goiDhe 'grave' etc. have been replaced with 'khete', 'macise' and 'kebre' respectively in day to day speech. At a syntactic level too there are some changes emerging such as case markers. In this paper I will show that such changes in modern Maithili are due to super-stratum influence. Some of the changes are also taking place due to globalization, i.e. macise. There are some socio-political reasons for variation in the written and spoken languages that may be the cause of some changes. In this paper I argue that Maithili has gone far from its sister's, i.e., Assamese, Bengali and Oriya, partly due to prolonged contact with Hindi and for socio-political reasons.
ISSN:0092-2323