Maithili

by Sunil Kumar Jha

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 author attempted to establish, describe and classify the speech sounds and sound systems of Maithili using a relatively more modern phonological framework, especially using the `standard theory` to generative phonology as presented by Chomsky and Halle in The Sound Pattern of English.It is hoped that this book will prove useful to linguists and phoneticians in particular and scholars interested in Maithili and related studies in general. Dr. SUNIL KUMAR JHA is a native speaker of a variety of the standard dialect of Maithili. It is that standard form of the language which he has investigated and described in this book. For the last 34 years Dr. Jha has been teaching English at Tribhuvan University. "Beacuse of Dr. Jha`s very good grounding in linguistics, his present book will be invaluable for people wishing to make a serious study of Maithili....this book will prove useful to linguists and phoneticians in particular and scholars in general." KEDAR B. MATHEMA "It is a welcome addition to the literature on Maithili language, specially so since work on the phonetics and phonology of Indian Languages is a rare commodity.` --CIEFL Bulletin Vol:12, No. 1&2, Dec., 2002