Page 67 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

Figure 3.1 shows that the Bhojpuri language (bho, ISO code) belongs to the
western part of the Eastern Zone of Indo-Aryan group of Indo-Iranian branch of the

Indo-European language family.
Similarly, since the Public Census began in Nepal, the ratio of the Bhojpuria
population has been observed as given in Table 3.2:

Table 3.2: Population of the Bhojpuri speech community in the censuses of Nepal

Year (AD) 1952-54 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001 2011

Total Pop. 4,235,079 9,412,996 11,555,986 15,022,839 18,491,097 11,736,934 26,494,504

Bhojpurias 477,281 577,357 806,480 1,142,805 1,3797,17 1,712,536 159,379
Ratio 5.8% 6.13% 6.98% 7.61% 7.46% 7.53% 6.0%

Source: Central Bureau of Statistics
Studying the rate of population growth in the country, the growth in

population of Bhojpurias from 1952 to 1981 is increasing whereas it has sharply
decreased in 1991. Relatively it has again regained a slight increase in 2001 and a

decline in 2011. The cause behind this might be an issue of study.
3.1.8 Writing system

The earlier records indicate that Bhojpuri was using its own script, Kaithi,
previously (Grierson 1883:18 and 1927:151, and Sharan & Das, 2014). The very
name has come from a traditional clerk caste, Kayastha, who were clerks of the

medieval states using this script. In those days all official records were maintained in
the same script but now it is almost extinct. Now it is written in Devanagari script.

Besides, the other new Indo-Aryan Languages such as Nepali, Hindi, Maithili and
Awadhi even including some Tibeto-Burman languages like Newar are also being

written in Devanagari script these days. Moreover, Pandey (2007) proposed to include
it in ISO/IEC 10646. Consequently, Kaithi script was added to the unicode standard in

October 2009 with the release of version 5.2.
The Devanagari script used in Bhojpuri mainly transcribes the spoken form of
the language into the written one. It is obvious because of the fact that there exists a

close correspondence between the phonemes and their written symbols in the
language unlike in Modern English, where pronunciation and its related spelling are

mostly arbitrary. As pointed by Shukla (1981:62), all the alphabets in this script are
not, however, distinctive and phonemic.

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