Languages Before Modern Standardisation

Standardisation Before grammars, censuses, school systems, print institutions and modern language movements imposed sharper names and norms, the Mithila–Vajji–Anga region was multilingual in a more fluid sense. People spoke local vernaculars, learned Sanskrit for specific intellectual and ritual purposes, encountered Prakrit, Apabhraṃśa and Avahaṭṭa as literary categories and inherited registers, and later moved through political worlds in which Persian and Arabic also mattered. The task is therefore not to search for a single moment when one modern language suddenly “began,” but to reconstruct how speech, writing, genre, script, mobility and institutional prestige interacted across centuries. 36.1 The problem: language history before fixed language borders Modern maps encourage the eye to imagine languages as territories separated by lines. That model is useful for administration and contemporary language policy, but it is hazardous when projected into the medieval past. Speech normally changed by degree across neighbouring villages and market zones. A traveller moving from western Vajji country through central Mithila toward Anga could encounter shifts in pronunciation, vocabulary and morphology without crossing a point where one complete linguistic system ended and another began. Written culture added a second layer: the language of a manuscript could differ sharply from the speech of its patron, scribe or audience. A source-critical history therefore treats “Maithili,” “Bajjika,” “Angika,” “Sanskrit,” “Avahaṭṭa” and “Persian” as historically situated labels and registers rather than timeless boxes. The question is not which modern community possessed a medieval district, but which linguistic resources were available to particular speakers, writers and institutions at particular times. 36.2 Sources: surviving writing is not a transcript of ordinary speech The archive is structurally unequal. Inscriptions survive because stone and copper endure; scholastic manuscripts survive because institutions copied them; courtly poems survive because patrons valued them. Everyday conversation, women’s domestic speech, children’s language, bargaining in weekly markets and the speech of mobile labourers were rarely written down. Historical linguistics can infer older phonology and morphology by comparing later forms, but inference is not direct recording. Literary texts also stylise language according to metre, genre and learned convention. For this reason the chapter uses several evidence streams together: dated or datable inscriptions, manuscripts, literary works, grammars compiled much later, comparative Indo-Aryan linguistics, script history, and regional historical context. Where these streams agree, reconstruction is stronger. Where only a later label is available, the chapter states the limitation instead of turning a retrospective classification into a medieval fact. 36.3 Sanskrit as a persistent high register, not the speech of an entire population Sanskrit remained central to learned life across Mithila for many centuries. Philosophical debate, ritual manuals, legal reasoning, scholastic commentary, royal praise and portions of documentary practice all used Sanskrit because it connected local intellectuals to transregional traditions. This durability can easily be misunderstood. Sanskrit prestige does not prove that cultivators, artisans or market populations used Sanskrit as their everyday language. Nor does the appearance of Sanskrit in a charter erase local speech. The more plausible social model is functional multilingualism: specialists mastered Sanskrit to differing degrees while vernaculars continued in households, fields, markets and oral performance. Mithila’s reputation for scholastic learning made this layered arrangement especially visible, but it was part of a wider South Asian 387387 GAJENDRA THAKUR pattern in which a cosmopolitan written language coexisted with regional speech. The distinction between register and mother tongue is essential to every later section of this chapter. Figure 140 — Language ecology before modern standardisation 36.4 From Old to Middle Indo-Aryan: descent is not a straight written chain Maithili belongs to the Indo-Aryan family, and comparative work traces major features of eastern New Indo-Aryan through developments from Old and Middle Indo-Aryan. Yet the historical path should not be pictured as one book-language mechanically turning into another. “Prakrit” itself names several literary and grammatical traditions as well as Middle Indo-Aryan speech phenomena. Spoken varieties changed continuously while written conventions could remain conservative. Sound change, reduction of inflection, growth of analytic constructions and new verbal patterns accumulated over long periods and at different rates. Subhadra Jha’s Formation of the Maithili Language remains a foundational diachronic synthesis, while later linguistics cautions against treating every modern form as derivable through a single Sanskritic line. Contact with neighbouring Indo-Aryan varieties and non-Indo-Aryan substrates also formed part of the regional history. Genealogy is therefore necessary, but genealogy alone is not a social history of language. 36.5 Prakrit as literary memory and analytical category Prakrit traditions mattered to eastern India through literature, drama, grammar and inherited ideas about the relation between refined and regional speech. A Sanskrit drama could allocate different Prakrits to characters according to genre conventions, but that allocation is not a sociolinguistic census. Grammarians classified speech according to learned systems that may preserve real regional features while also regularising them. The category “Māgadhī,” for example, has an important place in descriptions of eastern Middle Indo- Aryan, yet it cannot simply be equated with every vernacular historically spoken across the later territories of Bihar and Bengal. For Mithila–Vajji–Anga, Prakrit evidence is most useful when it helps explain a broad eastern Indo-Aryan development or a textual convention. It is least reliable when a literary language-name is transformed into a precise political map. This distinction prevents philological classification from becoming retrospective territorial history. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II 36.6 Apabhraṃśa and Avahaṭṭa: transitional written worlds Apabhraṃśa and Avahaṭṭa occupy a difficult but productive position between learned Middle Indo- Aryan traditions and the increasingly visible regional vernacular literatures of the later medieval period. The terms can refer to literary registers rather than to one uniform spoken language. Their forms vary by author, region and manuscript transmission. In eastern India, Avahaṭṭa became particularly important for poetry that stood close to emergent vernaculars while retaining supra-local literary conventions. The safest interpretation is therefore layered: Avahaṭṭa can preserve evidence for linguistic change and regional vocabulary, but an Avahaṭṭa poem is not a phonographic recording of a village conversation. In the Mithila tradition, its importance becomes especially clear in the later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura’s courtly works, which belong to a different historical context from the earlier Maithili Padāvalī tradition recognised by this volume. 36.7 The local vernacular existed before it became easy to see in manuscripts A written vernacular does not appear at the same moment as the speech from which it draws. By definition, the households and settlements of north Bihar and adjoining Nepal had local Indo-Aryan speech communities before those varieties became abundant in surviving manuscripts. The earliest written evidence is therefore a terminus for visibility, not a birth certificate. Comparative morphology and phonology also imply long development before the first substantial prose or poetry that modern scholars call Maithili. This principle is especially important because manuscript survival is accidental. A single lost collection can shift the apparent beginning of a literary tradition by centuries. Historians should therefore distinguish three dates: the period in which linguistic features were probably present in speech, the date of the earliest surviving text displaying them, and the later date when a modern scholarly name was applied consistently. Collapsing these dates creates false precision. 36.8 Early Maithili as a cluster of features rather than a modern standard When early vernacular material is identified as Maithili, the term should mean that a significant cluster of phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical features aligns with the historical development of Maithili. It should not imply conformity to a twentieth- or twenty-first-century spelling standard. Medieval scribes varied; manuscripts were recopied; orthography could reflect Sanskrit habits or local graphic practice; and authors could mix registers within one work. Early Maithili therefore needs to be recognised through converging linguistic evidence rather than by the presence of one modern shibboleth. This approach also allows internal variation to remain visible. The future standard language was selected from a larger field of regional speech. Some forms later became marked as dialectal, rustic, eastern or western only after standardisation created a stronger centre against which variation could be measured. 36.9 Varṇa-ratnākara: a major early vernacular prose witness Jyotirīśvara’s Varṇa-ratnākara, conventionally placed in the early fourteenth century, is one of the strongest surviving witnesses for an early Maithili prose tradition. Its importance lies not in supplying a complete grammar of contemporary speech but in showing that an extensive vernacular descriptive prose could sustain lists, social scenes, places, occupations, sensory detail and rhetorical catalogues. The surviving manuscript history also reminds us that texts travelled: the work came to modern scholarly attention through manuscript searching connected with Nepal and Bengal, demonstrating the wider circulation of Mithila’s textual culture. Because the text is highly crafted, its vocabulary is richer and more stylised than ordinary conversation would have been. Even so, it materially shifts the evidentiary balance. Vernacular prose was not merely an oral substrate beneath Sanskrit; it could itself become a sophisticated written medium. 389389 GAJENDRA THAKUR 36.10 What Varṇa-ratnākara can tell us—and what it cannot The work is a linguistic source precisely because it is a literary source, but the two uses must not be confused. Its lexical density can illuminate semantic fields, urban and courtly vocabulary, occupational terminology and descriptive conventions. Its grammatical forms can be compared with later Maithili. Yet a lexical item in the text does not prove equal use across all villages or social groups. Nor can manuscript spelling be assumed to reproduce pronunciation mechanically. The text’s social descriptions are rhetorical compositions, not questionnaires. The strongest historical use is therefore triangulation: linguistic forms are compared with other early eastern Indo-Aryan evidence, later Maithili, and the institutional context of the Karnata-era court. The result is a robust witness to vernacularisation without an exaggerated claim that one manuscript fixes every boundary or social register of fourteenth-century Mithila. Figure 141 — Evidence bands for vernacular formation, c. 600–1600 CE 36.11 The project’s two-Vidyāpati chronology and linguistic periodisation This volume maintains its adopted distinction between Mahākavi Vidyāpati, treated here as the pre- Jyotirīśvara Maithili Padāvalī poet, and the later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura associated with the Oiniwar court and Sanskrit/Avahaṭṭa works such as Kīrtilatā, Kīrtipatākā, Puruṣaparīkṣā, Gorakṣavijaya and Likhanāvalī. The distinction matters linguistically because otherwise texts belonging to different registers and historical contexts are collapsed into one authorial biography. Under the adopted framework, the earlier Padāvalī witnesses a Maithili poetic register before Jyotirīśvara, whereas the later Ṭhakkura demonstrates the continued coexistence of Sanskrit, Avahaṭṭa and vernacular resources in the fifteenth-century courtly world. Chapter 38 treats the two contexts directly. Here the methodological point is narrower: a history of language must date texts and registers before using them to construct a linear literary genealogy. 36.12 Multilingual courts: choice of language followed function A medieval court was not linguistically uniform. Praise, ritual, legal reasoning, correspondence, account keeping, entertainment and oral negotiation could call for different linguistic resources. Sanskrit carried immense learned authority; vernaculars reached audiences and performed regional identity; Avahaṭṭa offered a flexible literary medium; and, after the expansion of Sultanate political networks, Persian increasingly mattered in diplomacy and administration beyond or alongside local practices. The presence of several HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II languages in one court is therefore not evidence of confusion. It is evidence of specialisation. A ruler’s household might patronise a Sanskrit scholar and a vernacular performer while envoys dealt with Persianate courts through scribes and interpreters. This functional distribution explains why literary history built around only one language misses much of the actual social infrastructure of writing. 36.13 Script is not language One of the most persistent historical errors is to identify a language with one script. Maithili has a strong historical association with Tirhuta/Mithilākṣara, but language and graphic system are analytically different. A Maithili text may be copied in more than one script; Sanskrit may also appear in Tirhuta; and the use of Nāgarī or another script does not automatically change the language of the words. Script choice can reflect scribal training, manuscript genre, patronage, availability of type, administrative practice or later editorial intervention. Chapter 39 examines Tirhuta and scribal culture in detail. For the present chapter, the rule is simple: orthography is evidence about writing, not a direct territorial label for speech. This distinction becomes even more important in the early modern and colonial periods, when script politics contributed to modern language identities. 36.14 Manuscript copying creates linguistic layers A medieval text may survive only in a manuscript copied centuries later. Copyists can modernise spelling, substitute familiar words, regularise morphology, misunderstand older forms or silently mix their own conventions with those of the exemplar. Conversely, learned scribes can preserve archaic spellings after pronunciation has changed. Philology therefore distinguishes the date of composition from the date and place of a surviving copy. For early Maithili, this principle is indispensable. A fifteenth- or seventeenth- century manuscript of an older composition is evidence both for the earlier work and for the later transmission history, but not in identical ways. Variant readings across copies can sometimes reveal the movement of a text between regions. They can also warn against treating an editor’s normalised printed text as if it were the exact medieval manuscript surface. 36.15 Western Mithila and Vajji: gradients later named Bajjika The western portion of the wider Mithila–Vajji zone participated in a speech continuum shaped by contact toward the Gandak, north Bihar and adjoining eastern Uttar Pradesh. Modern Bajjika naming is valuable for describing contemporary and recent historical speech communities, and Chapter 42 studies that history directly. For the medieval period, however, the evidence does not justify drawing a sharp Bajjika– Maithili frontier on a modern district map. Features could diffuse through marriage networks, fairs, river crossings and market towns. Local identity and linguistic practice need not coincide exactly. The correct historical formulation is therefore that western vernacular zones displayed patterns that later classifications describe as Bajjika and related varieties, while remaining connected to central Mithila through continuous social interaction. This preserves linguistic difference without inventing a medieval language border for which no contemporary survey exists. 36.16 Eastern Mithila and Anga: gradients later named Angika The eastern side of the region was equally connected and equally variable. Speech in the old Anga– Bhagalpur–Munger zone interacted with central Mithila, Magadhan varieties and the languages of Bengal. Modern Angika naming identifies a real linguistic and cultural field, which Chapter 41 treats on its own terms. But medieval evidence again favours a continuum over a hard line. Rivers and trade routes brought 391391 GAJENDRA THAKUR eastern settlements into repeated contact with Bengal, while political and religious networks connected them westward and northward. A form that appears “eastern” in later classification may therefore reflect long contact rather than a neatly bounded ancestral language. Separating contemporary recognition from medieval reconstruction protects both: Angika need not be denied in order to avoid projecting its present boundary backward. 36.17 Central Mithila: prestige does not mean uniform speech Darbhanga and the central Mithila heartland later became particularly important in the codification and prestige economy of Maithili. That later history can create the illusion that a single central speech norm governed the whole region from the beginning. Medieval social geography was more plural. Courts, scholarly centres, agrarian settlements and pilgrimage sites formed nodes, not a uniform linguistic surface. Even within areas later treated as the Maithili core, pronunciation and lexicon could vary by locality, occupation, status, gender and mobility. A prestige literary variety can spread without erasing local speech. The emergence of a recognised written Maithili therefore needs to be separated from the much later production of a standard norm in grammar, print and education. The same language can possess a literary centre while remaining internally diverse. 36.18 Nepal Tarai and Kathmandu Valley: language moved with people and patronage Mithila’s linguistic history cannot stop at the modern India–Nepal boundary. The Karnata political world itself straddled the plains below the Himalayan foothills, and later movements of rulers, scholars, performers and manuscripts carried Maithili northward. Medieval and early modern Nepal preserves substantial evidence for Maithili literary use, especially in court and performance settings under later dynasties. This does not mean that Maithili replaced Newar, Nepali or other local languages. It entered a multilingual courtly ecology in which languages could be selected by genre and patronage. Manuscripts preserved in Nepal are therefore doubly important: they document Maithili’s wider literary reach and they show that archives survive outside the political territory in which a work originated. The borderland was a corridor, not a linguistic wall. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Figure 142 — Regional speech continuum without hard medieval language borders 36.19 Persian and Arabic contact: lexical borrowing follows institutions unevenly Chapter 35 traced Persianate culture as a transregional field. Linguistically, that field created opportunities for Persian and Arabic vocabulary to enter regional speech through administration, military organisation, trade, dress, material culture and religious institutions. Borrowing, however, must be dated item by item wherever possible. A Persian-derived word common in modern Maithili cannot automatically be assigned to the fourteenth century. Some loans may be early; others spread under Mughal or colonial regimes. Borrowing also does not imply grammatical replacement. The basic structure of Maithili remained Indo-Aryan while its lexicon continued to absorb words from many sources. Towns, courts and market networks probably experienced such contact earlier and more densely than isolated rural settlements. Linguistic influence therefore had a social geography. 36.20 Administrative multilingualism and the work of intermediaries Government depends on communication across levels. A Persian order from a superior court had to be understood by local officials; a revenue demand had to reach cultivators; petitions and disputes often moved upward from people who did not command the language of the highest office. This created work for scribes, translators, accountants and oral intermediaries. Sanskrit documentary habits, vernacular explanation and Persianate formulae could therefore coexist within one administrative chain. The resulting archive is deceptive because the language that survives on the most durable document may represent only the top layer of a multilingual transaction. Social history must reconstruct the missing translations beneath it. The same insight applies to land grants discussed in Chapter 26: a formal text addressed in a learned register still presupposed oral communication with resident cultivators. 36.21 Markets, pilgrimage and seasonal mobility as engines of convergence Language contact did not require royal policy. Weekly markets, river ferries, pilgrimage routes, marriage journeys, cattle movement, craft circulation and seasonal labour brought speakers from adjacent zones into recurrent contact. Repeated low-level contact can diffuse pronunciations and words without producing a literary record. This is one reason dialect continua are historically plausible even when manuscripts are sparse. The Ganga corridor connected Anga with Bihar and Bengal; north–south routes linked central Mithila with the Tarai; rivers both separated and connected settlement clusters. Market speech may have encouraged accommodation, code-switching and the use of widely intelligible forms. Such practices are almost invisible in elite texts, but they are necessary to explain why linguistic features rarely stop at political frontiers. 36.22 Oral genres preserve language differently from manuscripts Songs, ritual formulae, tales, proverbs, wedding genres and performance traditions can preserve archaic words and structures, yet oral transmission also changes continuously. A song recorded in the nineteenth or twentieth century may contain old material, but its current wording cannot simply be dated to the supposed origin of the tradition. Performance adapts to audience and memory. The historical value of oral material therefore lies in patterns: recurrent vocabulary, formulaic structures, genre-specific registers and comparison across versions. Chapter 40 examines oral culture in depth. For Chapter 36, oral tradition provides a necessary corrective to manuscript bias. It reminds us that literary history captures only part of the language environment and that communities without abundant manuscripts still possessed complex verbal arts. 393393 GAJENDRA THAKUR 36.23 Gender and the hidden sociolinguistic archive Formal manuscripts disproportionately record male authors, scribes and patrons, but household language was reproduced through women as well as men. Marriage moved women between villages and sometimes across speech zones, creating channels for lexical and phonological exchange that political histories rarely see. Women’s songs and ritual speech could maintain distinctive registers; domestic labour connected generations; elite women could also participate in patronage and manuscript culture, although the archive names them less often. Because direct medieval evidence is sparse, the chapter does not invent a separate female dialect. The secure conclusion is methodological: a language history built only from named male authors cannot represent the whole speech community. Gendered mobility and oral transmission must remain part of the explanatory model even where exact forms cannot be recovered. 36.24 Social rank, occupation and repertoire Linguistic competence was unequally distributed. A Sanskrit scholar, merchant, soldier, village headman, artisan, mendicant and cultivator could share a local vernacular while possessing very different additional repertoires. Some learned men commanded multiple written languages; others relied on oral specialists. Occupational groups that travelled—traders, performers, religious mendicants, messengers and soldiers— were especially likely to develop accommodation strategies across dialect zones. Social rank could influence access to literacy without determining the language of everyday life. The result was not a simple hierarchy in which one caste spoke Sanskrit and another spoke Maithili. Rather, registers overlapped unevenly, and individuals could move among them according to context. This repertoire model is more historically plausible than assigning one language to one social category. 36.25 Place names and personal names: useful but dangerous evidence Inscriptions and manuscripts preserve place names and personal names that can reveal phonological adaptation, regional vocabulary and the coexistence of naming traditions. Yet names are conservative and mobile. A Sanskritised place name in a charter may differ from local pronunciation; a Persian chronicle may transliterate the same settlement differently; a scribe may use an inherited official form long after speech has changed. Personal names travel with religion, patronage and fashion. Onomastic evidence is therefore strongest when several dated examples show a pattern. A single spelling should not be used to reconstruct an entire local phonology. Historical geography benefits from names, but language history must distinguish the language of a name’s recorded form from the language spoken around the named place. 36.26 The history of the name “Maithili” Language names are themselves historical evidence. “Maithili” derives its force from the regional name Mithila and ultimately became the standard modern designation of the language. Earlier sources, however, may use regional, literary or generic labels differently, and external observers later used forms such as Tirhutiya/Tirhutia. The absence of the modern name in an early text does not prove the absence of the language; conversely, the appearance of a regional label does not guarantee that it had the same technical linguistic meaning as today. Colonial philology, especially Grierson’s grammar and Linguistic Survey, greatly sharpened the classificatory visibility of Maithili in modern scholarship. That achievement must be recognised without mistaking nineteenth-century taxonomy for medieval self-description. HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II 36.27 Colonial grammars are indispensable evidence—and late evidence George A. Grierson’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century work documented Maithili grammar, vocabulary, scripts and regional variation with extraordinary detail. The Linguistic Survey of India created a comparative record that remains fundamental. But these works belong to a period already shaped by colonial administration, print, schooling and new ideas of language classification. They are therefore excellent sources for reconstructing recent forms and for comparative back-projection where historical linguistics permits it, but they cannot directly describe a fourteenth-century village. Grierson’s categories also participated in the modern process by which languages and dialects were named, bounded and ranked. A critical history uses his data while historicising his classificatory framework. 36.28 Standardisation changes the meaning of “variation” Before a powerful standard exists, variation is simply part of ordinary linguistic life. Once grammars, dictionaries, examinations, newspapers and schools privilege selected forms, alternatives can be reclassified as dialectal, incorrect, rustic or regional. This social transformation belongs mainly to later chapters, but it explains why modern intuition is a poor guide to medieval language. A form now considered non-standard may preserve an old feature; a prestigious modern form may have spread relatively recently. Standardisation also fixes spelling more strongly and links language identity to institutions. Chapter 36 therefore ends before that process becomes dominant. Its purpose is to recover the open field from which later standard Maithili, modern Angika and Bajjika identities, and neighbouring language norms emerged. 36.29 Evidence firewall: speech, register, script and standard must stay separate Four analytical categories must not be collapsed. Speech is the changing everyday linguistic system used by communities. A written register is a socially selected form shaped by genre and institution. Script is the graphic technology used to represent a language. A standard is a later normative selection backed by grammars, print, education or administration. One language can use several scripts; one script can write several languages; one speaker can command several registers; a standard can emerge long after the speech it codifies. Most historical errors in this field come from substituting one category for another—for example, treating Tirhuta script as proof of one spoken boundary, or using a Sanskrit manuscript to infer Sanskrit household speech. The evidence firewall protects against such substitutions. 395395 GAJENDRA THAKUR Figure 143 — Evidence firewall: speech, written register, script and later standardisation 36.30 Conclusion: a multilingual region before standard language regimes Before modern standardisation, Mithila–Vajji–Anga was neither linguistically formless nor neatly partitioned into the language territories familiar today. It possessed structured repertoires: durable Sanskrit learning, Middle Indo-Aryan inheritances, Apabhraṃśa and Avahaṭṭa literary practices, increasingly visible Maithili vernacular writing, western and eastern speech continua, oral genres, and growing contact with Persianate institutions. Nepal was part of this circulation, not an external afterthought. The strongest history is therefore one of vernacularisation within multilingual continuity. Languages developed through speech communities and contact long before grammars fixed their boundaries. Chapter 37 can now examine the more specific question of how a literary Maithili tradition was formed, while Chapters 41 and 42 will return separately to the eastern Angika and western Bajjika zones without projecting modern boundaries backward. Table 36.1 — Languages before modern standardisation: evidence, secure use and limit Evidence What it can establish Best historical use Limit / caution securely Dated inscriptions Recorded language, Anchor documentary Formal language may and charters script, names, titles and registers and onomastic differ from local formulae at a specific forms speech time Manuscripts Vocabulary, grammar, Trace written Copy date may be genre and scribal vernacularisation and later than practice in surviving textual circulation composition; scribes copies can alter forms Varṇa-ratnākara and Substantial early Demonstrate capacity Literary style is not a other literary texts vernacular forms and of vernacular transcript of lexical fields prose/literature everyday speech Comparative Regular Reconstruct long-term Reconstruction is historical linguistics correspondences and phonological and inferential, not a probable earlier forms morphological dated recording development Later grammars and Detailed modern/recent Provide comparative Colonial or modern surveys grammar, vocabulary baseline and evidence categories cannot be and regional variation for standardisation back-projected HISTORY OF MITHILA, VAJJI & ANGA — VOLUME II Evidence What it can establish Best historical use Limit / caution securely unchanged Oral genres Formulae, lexicon, Recover non- Current wording recorded later performance registers manuscript dimensions cannot automatically and variant traditions of language history be dated to the tradition’s origin Script evidence Graphic conventions, Study Tirhuta/Nāgarī Script does not equal scribal training and and other writing language or spoken manuscript networks practices territory 397397