A Quarrel in the Language Family: Agency and Representations of Speech in Mithila

Abstract

I came upon this passage in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1927: 1: 1: 19) after having spent a year in the provincial town of Janakpur, documenting the Maithili language of northern Bihar and southeastern Nepal. Many local people encouraged and assisted me in my research, but all told me in good faith that I had come to the wrong place. I should have gone twenty miles to the southeast, where the ‘authentic’ language is spoken. It seems that I had not been alone in having been urged by informants and well-wishers to go somewhere else: either in pursuit of languages that do not exist or being redirected down the road to where the language is really spoken. Unfortunately visa problems prevented me from taking up the advice of friends, yet a cursory reading of the literature on regional and social dialectology would have been enough to turn anyone into a skeptic about what one might have been gained from such a journey. Subjective dialect boundaries do not often register on maps of isoglosses, and the objective methods of linguists usually reveal local perceptions of speech behaviour to be based on stereotypes.

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