Page 61 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

CHAPTER 3
SOME SOCIOLINGUISTIC ASPECTS

3.0 Outline
This chapter deals with some sociolinguistic aspects of Bhojpuri. It consists of
9 sections. Section 3.1 describes the native speakers and language, section 3.2

presents language resources and organizations, we present mother tongue proficiency
and bi/multilingualism in section 3.3. Section 3.4 describes domains of language use

and section 3.5 presents language vitality, transmission and maintenance. Section 3.6
examines language attitudes and section 3.7 describes language development. In

section 3.8 we describe dialectal variation and we conclude the chapter in section 3.9.
3.1 The native speakers and language

Bhojpuri is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Sarlahi, Rautahat, Bara, Parsa,
Chitwan, Nawalparasi (east and west) and Rupandehi districts of the Province No. 2,
Bagmati, 4 and 5 of Nepal. According to the Census Report, 2012; 1,584,958

Nepalese citizens speak Bhojpuri as their mother tongue comprising 6% of the total
1
Nepalese population.
According to Ethnologue (2012), there are about 124 living languages and
dialects of four different genetic stocks spoken within the country. The latest official

census of 2011 records the numbers of speakers for 123 languages and also an
additional category of ‘other unknown languages’ with close to half million speakers.

However, there is no reliable estimate of the actual number of languages spoken
within the country.
According to the Census 2011, Bhojpuri is the language spoken by divergent

groups of religions, ethnicities and cultures of Nepal, living in low land locally known
as Tarai/Madhesh. There are different caste and creed living in the region such as

Hindus, Muslims and Christians by faith; Baji, Tharu and other indigenous
nationalities by ethnicities that comprise Madheshi and others as social communities.
Native Bhojpuri speakers also live in the wide stretch of the adjacent Indian territories

of western Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and other Indian provinces.
Besides, it is also spoken in Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Tobago, Suriname, South Africa

1. However, the researcher observed some discrepancy in between the data of the total population of
Bhojpuri speakers published by CBS, 2012 and assumptions of the speech community itself during the
survey. The Bhojpuri speech community claims their population to be at least 2,000,000.
35