Maithili

Abstract: Maithili features one of the most complex agreement systems of any Indo-Aryan language. Not only nominative and non-nominative subjects, but also objects, other core arguments, and even nonarguments are cross-referenced, allowing for a maximum of three participants encoded by the verb desinences. The categories reflected in the morphology are person, honorific degree, and, in the case of third persons, gender, spatial distance, and focus. However, not all combinations of category choices are equally represented, and there are many cases of neutralization. We demonstrate that the paradigm structure of Maithili verb agreement is not arbitrary but can be predicted by two general principles of interaction in Maithil society: a principle of social hierarchy underlying the evaluation of people's “face” (Brown and Levinson 1987[1978]), and a principle of social solidarity defining degrees of “empathy” (Kuno 1987) to which people identify with others. Maithili verb agreement not only reflects a specific style of social cognition but also constitutes a prime means of maintaining this style by requiring constant attention to its defining parameters. In line with this, we find that the system is partly reduced by uneducated, so-called lower-caste speakers, who are least interested in maintaining this style, especially its emphasis on hierarchy.

Abstract: Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the Northern part of the Indian subcontinent. Although Hindi, the national language, is spoken and understood very well in them, the vast majority of the members of these communities use the languages of Bhojpuri, Magahi, or Maithili as the only medium of communication in their daily lives. It may be that other Indian communities also use weeping to communicate, but I do not possess any reliable information on this subject. Therefore, this report will describe this communicative mode only as it obtains in these speech communities. These are predominantly agricultural regions with residents living in villages. Literacy is not widespread and caste hierarchy is rigidly maintained. Women observe purdah and receive whatever education is available in the village school. Men, especially upper caste men, do not like their women to violate the purdah system. However, it is very different with lower caste men and women, inasmuch as purdah is not an inviolate system with them. Lower caste women work together with their men to earn their living. But it has been observed that as soon as a lower caste man has

Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila, South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the ‘modern’ selves envisioned within them are constrained by both overt and subtle means. In the context of shifting cultural anchors, new practices of silence, literacy, and even behaviors interpreted as ‘mental illness’ may become tactics in an individual's negotiation of conflicting self-representations. The confluence of forces at play in contemporary Mithila, moreover, is creating new...

Abstract: I came upon this passage in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1927: 1: 1: 19) after having spent a year in the provincial town of Janakpur, documenting the Maithili language of northern Bihar and southeastern Nepal. Many local people encouraged and assisted me in my research, but all told me in good faith that I had come to the wrong place. I should have gone twenty miles to the southeast, where the ‘authentic’ language is spoken. It seems that I had not been alone in having been urged by informants and well-wishers to go somewhere else: either in pursuit of languages that do not exist or being redirected down the road to where the language is really spoken. Unfortunately visa problems prevented me from taking up the advice of friends, yet a cursory reading of the literature on regional and social dialectology would have been enough to turn anyone into a skeptic about what one might have been gained from such a journey. Subjective dialect boundaries do not often register on maps of isoglosses, and the objective methods of linguists usually reveal local perceptions of speech behaviour to be based on stereotypes.