The Magahi language is a language spoken by 17,449,446 people in India. The ancestor of Magahi, from which its name derives, Magadhi Prakrit, is believed to be the language spoken by the Buddha, and the language of the ancient kingdom of Magadha. Magahi is closely related to Bhojpuri and Maithili and these languages are sometimes referred to as a single language, Bihari. These languages, together with several other related languages, are known as the Bihari languages, which form a sub-group of the Eastern Zone group of Indo-Aryan languages.
Magahi has approximately 13 million speakers. It is primarily spoken in the Magadh area of Bihar state. This area includes Patna, Gaya, Aurangabad, Jehanabad, Nalanda, and other surrounding districts. It is also spoken in some areas of Hazaribagh, Giridih, Palamau, Munger, and Bhagalpur, with some speakers in the Malda District of West Bengal. It is generally written using Devanagari script.
It was once mistakenly thought to be dialects of Hindi, but has been more recently shown to be descendant of and very similar to Eastern Group of Indic languages, along with Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya. It has a very rich and old tradition of folk songs and stories. It is spoken in 8 districts in Bihar, 3 in Jharkhand and has some speakers in Malda, West Bengal
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Last updated on Friday July 18, 2008 at 03:56:09 PDT (GMT -0700)
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