The Bajjika language and speech community Abhishek Kumar Kashyap
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Abhishek Kumar Kashyap
Abstract
This article reports on Bajjika, a minority language of the Bihari group of the Indo-Aryan language family. Bajjika is spoken by millions of speakers in the northern part of the north Indian state of Bihar and more than 200,000 speakers in Nepal. Although Bajjika is spoken by a significant segment of the population of Bihar, it has no institutional or educational role in the community or government. Little is known about this language in terms of demographic and ethno-linguistic details, not only to the world but also within India beyond the speech community. This article provides details about the speech community of Bajjika, its language status, functional role in the community and the revival efforts made by exponents of the language. Finally, suggestions for the maintenance of this language are made.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Towards a sociolinguistics of the border
- A borderlands' perspective of language and globalization
- Linguistic landscapes on the other side of the border: signs, language and the construction of cultural identity in Transnistria
- Scripting the border: script practices and territorial imagination among Santali speakers in eastern India
- Determinants of language reproduction and shift in a transnational community
- From Trujillo to the terremoto: the effect of language ideologies on the language attitudes and behaviors of the rural youth of the northern Dominican border
- From ``Spanish-only'' cheap labor to stratified bilingualism: language, markets and institutions on the US-Mexico border
- Competing language ideologies about societal multilingualism among cross-border workers in Luxembourg
- Nationalist border practices: a critical account of how and why an English language classroom on the US/Mexico border reproduces nationalism
- Third border talk: intersubjectivity, power negotiation and the making of race in Spanish language classrooms
- Mobilizing voices and evaluations across representational boundaries – equitably and adequatively
- Book reviews
- Book review
- Book review
- Small languages and small language communities 76
- The Bajjika language and speech community Abhishek Kumar Kashyap
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Towards a sociolinguistics of the border
- A borderlands' perspective of language and globalization
- Linguistic landscapes on the other side of the border: signs, language and the construction of cultural identity in Transnistria
- Scripting the border: script practices and territorial imagination among Santali speakers in eastern India
- Determinants of language reproduction and shift in a transnational community
- From Trujillo to the terremoto: the effect of language ideologies on the language attitudes and behaviors of the rural youth of the northern Dominican border
- From ``Spanish-only'' cheap labor to stratified bilingualism: language, markets and institutions on the US-Mexico border
- Competing language ideologies about societal multilingualism among cross-border workers in Luxembourg
- Nationalist border practices: a critical account of how and why an English language classroom on the US/Mexico border reproduces nationalism
- Third border talk: intersubjectivity, power negotiation and the making of race in Spanish language classrooms
- Mobilizing voices and evaluations across representational boundaries – equitably and adequatively
- Book reviews
- Book review
- Book review
- Small languages and small language communities 76
- The Bajjika language and speech community Abhishek Kumar Kashyap
