Arimardan speaking Bhojpuri
Bhojpuri-speaker Arimardan is a linguist at the Endangered Languages Center in West Bengal. Bhojpuri is one of the Bihari Indo-Aryan languages of India. It is also spoken in Nepal and the Caribbean. Recorded at the Centre for Endangered Languages in Santiniketan, Bolpur by Abhantika Gosh, Kristen Tcherneshoff, and Daniel Bögre Udell. Bhojpuri (Bajpuri, Bhojapuri) is an Indo-Aryan language of India. As of 2011, it is spoken by over 50 million people in India, and over 52 million total users around the world. Bhojpuri has 8 different dialects, but these could be different languages originating from Bhojpuri. Bhojpuri is spoken in the Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand states of northern India, as well as in Nepal and throughout the Hindi diaspora in the Caribbean. The Kaithi and Devanagari scripts are both used to write Bhojpuri. It is taught in schools of the aforementioned states of India, as well as regularly heard and read on television, literature, radio, and videos. Language activists now seek to have Bhojpuri included in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India, which lists the Republic of India’s official languages. Geologically, linguists tend to classify Bhojpuri as an Eastern Indo-Aryan language alongside Bengali, Odia, Assamese, and many others. Sociologically, Bhojpuri is often described as one of the seven "Hindi languages", which are a group of Central Indo-Aryan languages found in India; of these, Bhojpuri has the most allophonic variation in vowels. It has an interesting syntactic and vocabulary system that allows for tiered politeness, with casual and intimate, polite and intimate, formal yet intimate, polite and formal, and extremely formal conversation all having their own conjugations and grammatical rules. This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. To download a copy, please contact hello@wikitongues.org.