World Language Map

Where is Maithili spoken?

Maithili (मैथिली) is an Indo-European language, spoken in India and Nepal. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

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  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Maithili is spoken

Maithili is spoken in 2 countries: India and Nepal. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
India1.2%16,909,560
Nepal11%3,423,464

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Maithili is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Maithili.

How many people speak Maithili?

Wikidata gives about 33.9 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 195,000 second-language speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2001). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Maithili sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Maithili as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Indo-Iranian
  4. Indo-Aryan
  5. Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan
  6. Continental Indo-Aryan
  7. Midlands Indo-Aryan
  8. Shaurasenic
  9. Bihari
  10. Magadhan
  11. Maithili

Related languages

Other languages in the Magadhan group:

More about Maithili

Codes: ISO 639-3 mai, Glottolog mait1250. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Maithili

Where is Maithili spoken?

Maithili is spoken in India and Nepal. Unicode CLDR puts it at 1.2% of the population of India, which is about 16,909,560 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Maithili?

Wikidata gives about 33.9 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 195,000 second-language speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2001).

Which language family is Maithili in?

Glottolog places Maithili in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan, Continental Indo-Aryan, Midlands Indo-Aryan, Shaurasenic, Bihari and Magadhan.

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