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Magahi linguistic data
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Common questions about Magahi
What linguistic data does this Magahi page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Magahi's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Magahi data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
How is Magahi related to Maithili and Bhojpuri?
All three are Bihari Indo-Aryan languages, geographically adjacent in Bihar/Jharkhand, sharing SOV typology, postpositions, ergative-past patterns, and a chunk of cognate vocabulary. Magahi shares the addressee-agreement pattern with Maithili. They aren't fully mutually intelligible without exposure but converge enough to be treated as a dialect continuum.
What is the Kaithi script?
Kaithi was the historical script of the Bihari languages (Magahi, Bhojpuri, Maithili) and parts of eastern UP, used widely from the 16th to early 20th centuries for legal documents, accounts, and personal correspondence. It's a Brahmic abugida like Devanagari but with simpler letterforms suited to fast handwriting. Devanagari has displaced it in modern use, but Kaithi survives in some regional contexts.
Why does Magahi cluster with Bhojpuri or Maithili on similarity scores?
All three are Bihari Indo-Aryan, share core grammar, and have heavy lexical overlap. Magahi sits in the middle of the Bihari dialect area geographically. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Magahi
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Grierson, G.A. (1903). Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. V, Part 2. Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta. [Magahi section]
- Jha, S. (1958). The Formation of the Maithili Language. Luzac & Co., London. [Eastern Indo-Aryan comparison]
- Verma, M.K. (1991). "Magahi." In E. Kachru & S. Sridhar (eds.), Language in South Asia. Cambridge University Press.
- Masica, C.P. (1991). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge University Press.
- Ohala, M. (1983). Aspects of Hindi Grammar. Manohar, New Delhi. [comparative Indo-Aryan context]