Linguistic Survey of India- Vol.V, Indo-Aryan Family Eastern Group, Part-II. 

Abstract

Bihari means properly the language of Bihar, and is spoken over nearly the whole of that Province. It is spoken also outside its limits, but where spoken. . g cane^ akove name • f0r not only is it, as a matter of 'fact, specially the language of Bihar, but also the only one of its dialects which has received any literary culture is peculiar to the north of that province. On the west, Bihari is spoken in the Eastevji districts of the Province of Agra, and even in <a small portion of Oudh. On the south it is spoken on the two plateaux of Chota Nagpur., Roughly it covers an area of 90,000 square miles, and is the language of 36,000,000 people. It extends from the lower ranges of the Himalayas on the North to Singhbhum on the South, and from Manbhum on the South-east to Basti on the North-west. Within the area in which it is spoken, are the two great cities of Benares and Patna. Biharlis bounded on the North by the Tibeto-Burman Languages of the Himalayas, on the East by Bengali, on the South by. Oriya, .and Language-boundaries. on the West by the Ohhattlsgarhl,, Bagheli, and Awadhi dialects of Eastern Hindi. It is the most Western of the languages which form the Eastern Group of the Indo-Aryan Yernaculars. Bihari has hitherto b£en classed as belonging to the Mediate Group of these vernaculars, being thus brought into close relationship with its Classification. Eastern Hindi, Bagheli, and Ohhattlsgarhl. Further investigation has, however, shown that this classification cannot be correct. It certainly belongs to the same group as Bengali, Oriya, and Assamese. It is true that the nationalities who speak it are historically connected with the United Provinces and not with Bengal. All their family ties, all their traditions, point to the West and not to ths East. But at present our. affair is not with ethnic relations, but with the facts of grammar, and, taking grammar as the test, there can be no doubt either as to the origin or affiliation of Bihari. Like Bengali, Oriya, and Assamese, it is a direct descendant, perhaps the most direct of the descendants, of the old form of speech known as Magadhl Prakrit, and has so much in common with them in its inflexional ystem that it would almost be possible to make one grammar for all the four languages. In order to show this, it will be necessary to give a brief comparative sketch of the grammars of Bihari and of Bengali, its neighbour to the BiharT compared with Bengali. j, _ Jiast. Bihari, as we go westward, more and more* departs from the standard of Bengali, and approaches that of the other languages of the United Provinces. I shall therefore take, for £he purposes of comparison, the dialect, Maithili, which is situated on the East of the Bihari tract, and which is therefore most near to Bengali. I shall show, not only the principal points in which Maithili agrees with Bengali, but also those in wliich ’it differs from it in favour of its Western neighbour Eastern Hindi. In regard to pronunciation, Bihari occupies a middle place between Bengali and Eastern Hindi. Nothing is so characteristic of Bengali as its pronunciation of the vowel a and .of the conso-» nant s.