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Magadhi language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Magadhi मगही magahī |
||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | India | |
| Region: | Bihar in India | |
| Total speakers: | 11,362,000 | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Eastern Group Bihari Magadhi |
|
| Writing system: | Devanagari, Kaithi | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language in: | Bihar state in India | |
| Regulated by: | no official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | ||
| ISO 639-3: | mag | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Magadhi language (also known as मगही Magahi) is a language spoken by 17,449,446 people in India. An earlier form of Magadhi, known as Magadhi Prakrit, is believed to be the language spoken by The Buddha, and the language of the ancient kingdom of Magadha. Magadhi is closely related to Bhojpuri and Maithili and these languages are sometimes referred to as a single language, Bihari. These languages, together with several other related languages, are known as the Bihari languages, which form a sub-group of the Eastern Zone group of Indo-Aryan languages.
Magadhi has approximately 13 million speakers. It is primarily spoken in the Magadh area of Bihar state. This area includes Patna, Gaya, Aurangabad, Jehanabad, Nalanda, and other surrounding districts. It is also spoken in some areas of Hazaribagh, Giridih, Palamau, Munger, and Bhagalpur, with some speakers in the Malda District of West Bengal. It is generally written using Devanagari script.
It was once mistakenly thought to be dialects of Hindi, but has been more recently shown to be descendant of and very similar to Eastern Group of Indic languages, along with Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya. It has a very rich and old tradition of folk songs and stories. It is spoken in 8 districts in Bihar, 3 in Jharkhand and has some speakers in Malda, West Bengal