THE POSITION OF THE BIHARI DIALECTS IN INDO-ARYAN* 0.1. This paper is an attempt to make some preliminary suggestions about the position of the languages of northern India known as the Bih~r[ dialects within the Indo-Aryan family. The languages under discussion are Maithilf (Mth.), Magahl-(Mag.), and Bhojpuri (Bhoj.). They are spoken in an area linguistically bounded on the west by speakers of the Midlands (or Hindi-) languages, (Hindi, Braj, Bundle, Awadhi, etc.1), and to the east by speakers of the Eastern (or Bengali) languages, (Bengali, Assamese, and Oriyg).
It is difficult to do historical work with languages such as those of Bihar for a number of reasons. Since they are spoken in an area bounded by speakers of two such socially and culturally dominant language groups, there is a considerable amount of borrowing. Because the differences between the languages involved are often not very great, once borrowing has occurred, it is difficult to determine what represents the native element in the lexicon, and which words are borrowed from cognate languages. 2 Another problem that the linguist confronts in an attempt at an historical investigation of these languages is conflicting data. Whereas languages like Hindi or Bengali have fairly standardized dialects which serve, at least, as a starting point in historical work, the languages under discussion here have no such standard forms. Consequently, the investigator is forced to select for citation from the * I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. P. B. Pandit, who introduced me to the fascinating study of historical Indo-Aryan dialectology, and who gave me valuable direction in the preparation of an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank Gordon Fairbanks who made me aware of the importance of following strict linguistic principles in attempts to determine the internal histories of language families. 1 Actually, the so-called Hindi languages are generally considered to comprise two groups, Eastern Hindi (Awadhf, Baghel[, Chattisgarhi) and Western Hind~ (Hindi-Urdfi, Braj, Bundel~, etc.). Despite the fact that many features are shared by these two groups (collectively termed Midlands languages here), some scholars have seen a special relationship between Eastern Hindi and the Bih~r languages (perhaps, more properly, between Eastern Hindf and the larger eastern group, Bengali and BihSri, of traditional sub-groupings (see 0.2)). This paper will argue that Bih~r~ shares no major phonological innovations with the Bengali languages or any Hindi language which is not shared by the whole northern complex of dialects stretching from West I-Iindf to the Eastern dialects.
2 The problem is even more complex, because it is also important, and often difficult to distinguish, for both native and borrowed forms, which are words that come to the modern dialect from OIA through MIA as a result of regular processes of linguistic evolution (tadbhava words), and which have been borrowed by a given language from Sanskrit and subsequently modified to conform to the phonological principles of the borrowing language (tatsama words).