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Maithili Language is spoken both in Nepal as well as in India. Maithili Language comes under the language family of Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Eastern Group, Indo-Aryan and Bihari. There are three modes of writing in the Maithili Language, namely, Devanagari, Mithilakshar and Kaithi. Maithili is one of the official languages of Bihar. In Nepal, Maithili Language is mostly spoken in the Terai regions. Maithili is also considered as an Eastern-Indic language.
Maithili is considered as a dialect of both Bengali and Hindi. The language of Maithili has been assigned the position of being the mother tongue of Hindi. There are a total of forty five million speakers of Maithili Language and the language is at the 40th position in the world. Maithili is an independent language in India according to the Indian Constitution. Maithili Language is used in the government, education and other such official issues.
Traditionally, Maithili Language was always written in its own script. Those were known as Kaithi, Mithilakshar and Tirhuta scripts having similarities with the Bengali script. The word Maithiliis derived from Mithila, an independent state of ancient India. The earliest literary work in Maithili Language is Varn Ratnakar written by Jyotirishwar Thakur in 1224 A.D. The eminent scholar Vidyapati also wrote some of the famous songs in Maithili Language of Nepal in the Shringar and Bhakti group of poems.
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