Maithili: Some Aspects of Its Phonetics and Phonology

Maithili : Some Aspects of Its Phonetics and Phonology presents an account of some phonetic and phonological aspects of a variety of the ‘standard’ dialect of Maithili, a modern Indo-Aryan language spoken by more than 21 million people in the northern and eastern regions of the state of Bihar in India and in the Tarai districts of Nepal. The contents of this book are divided into eight chapters. The first chapter is introductory, and it concentrates its discussion on such topics as: the number of Maithili speakers and its linguistic boundaries, its genetic classification and its place among the modern Indo-Aryan languages, linguistic and phonetic studies on Maithili, the emergence of a ‘standard’ in Maithili and its present-day situation. The second and third chapters attempt to classify and describe all the vowels (chapter 2) and consonants (chapter 3) that are phonologically distinctive in Maithili. Chapter 4 describes the Maithili oral and nasal vowels as well as its oral dipthongs in terms of their main acoustic properties. Chapter 5 discusses the results of an electroglottographic study on the duration of the Maithili vowels in various phonetic environments. Chapter 6 outlines a set of sixteen distinctive features and presents a distinctive feature analysis of the Maithili phonemes using that set. Chapter 7 studies the processes of consonant gemination as well as some major assimilatory and non-assimilatory processes occurring in Maithili phonology. The last 8 chapter investigates the morpho-phonology of the Maithili verbs and verb forms, and discusses the processes of consonant weakening and elision in Maithili.