Language, Education and Cultural Institutions in Nepal

Detailed chapter description

Language, education and cultural institutions in Nepal Mithila/Madhesh have never formed a single hierarchy. Maithili has long been a language of household life, ritual, literature, performance and cross-border communication, while Sanskrit, Nepali, Hindi, Urdu, Bhojpuri, Bajjika and English have occupied different institutional niches at different times. The modern state expanded schools, examinations, universities, academies and broadcasting, but it also attached unequal prestige and administrative power to languages. The historical problem is therefore not whether Maithili survived, but how institutions distributed literacy, credentials, public visibility and cultural authority among languages. This chapter treats language policy, schooling and cultural organisation together because each changed the social value of the others. The eastern and central Tarai/Madhesh were multilingual before mass schooling. Maithili dominated large parts of Saptari, Siraha, Dhanusha and Mahottari, but speech communities interacted with Bhojpuri, Bajjika, Urdu, Nepali, Sanskrit and Hindi through markets, courts, pilgrimage, marriage and religious instruction. A language could be dominant in the household and village while another carried administrative, scholastic or commercial prestige. The expansion of modern education therefore entered an already layered linguistic ecology rather than creating one from nothing. The 1952/54 census reported 918,211 persons under ‘Maithili and dialects’; the 1961 count was 1,130,402 and the 1971 count 1,327,242. Later censuses recorded 2.192 million Maithili mother-tongue speakers in 1991, 2.798 million in 2001, 3.093 million in 2011 and 3.222 million in 2021. These figures establish the large demographic base of Maithili, but they are not a simple time series of language shift. Census categories, dialect boundaries, enumerator practice and the treatment of Hindi, Bajjika and related speech changed over time.