Publications

Publication details [#28940]

Jha, Shailjanand. 1994. Maithili in the Indian census. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 15 (5) : 385–397.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
Multilingual Matters
ISBN
0143-4632

Annotation

This paper provides a sociolinguistic appraisal of the language representation of the Indian census, in particular with regard to the status of Maithili, often referred to as Hindi instead of being considered an independent language. It is argued that many problems arise out of the Indian census' inconsistent interpretation of 'language', 'dialect' and 'mother tongue'.