Page 27 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

1.0 Background
This study is an attempt to present a linguistic analysis of the Bhojpuri
language within the framework of functional-typological grammar developed by

Givón (2001a and b), with adaptive approach to grammar (Givón, 2009). Bhojpuri
belongs to a group of languages usually referred to as Indo-Aryan, a branch of the

Indo-European family of languages. Within Indo-Aryan trait, it is the western in the
group of Maithili, Magahi and Bhojpuri as Grierson (1883) and Tiwari (1954 and

1960). According to the Census Report, 2012; there are 1,584,958 Nepalese citizens
who speak Bhojpuri as their mother tongue, comprising 6% of the total population of
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Nepal. The spread of Bhojpuri in Nepal is observed in the districts of Sarlahi,
Rautahat, Bara, Parsa, Chitwan, Nawalparasi (east and west) and Rupandehi. The
Bhojpuri speech community also resides in the adjacent Indian bordering territories of

west Bihar and east Uttar Pradesh along with Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and
Chhattisgarh, as well as worldwide due to indenture labour in the past and foreign

employment contemporarily.
Till date, Bhojpuri has been described in the framework of Sanskrit tradition,

structural and transformational-generative models by some grammarians and linguists
but no attempt has been made to describe this language within functional-typological

perspective including adaptive approach to grammar.
1.1 Statement of the problem
Significant attempts have been made so far to describe grammar of the

Bhojpuri language. But no attempts have ever been made into functional approach to
language and typological approach to grammar of Bhojpuri at the propositional and

multi-propositional levels. The main problem of this study is how to write a grammar
of Bhojpuri from the perspective of the functional-typology with adaptive approach to
grammar. The specific problems of this study are as follows:

a) What are the sociolinguistic aspects of the language?
b) What are the phonetic, phonological and the morphophonemic features of

the language?

1. However, there is discrepancy between the data about the total population of Bhojpuri speakers published
by CBS, 2012 and the one as expected by the speech community itself during the survey. It is estimated to
be at least 2,000,000 Bhojpuri native speakers in Nepal by the Bhojpuri speech community.
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