Maithili Alphabet & Letters

Maithili is written today in Devanagari, the same script as Hindi, Nepali and Marathi, both in Bihar and in Nepal: left to right, the letters hanging from a line along the top. A common Devanagari core uses the independent vowels अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ए ऐ ओ औ, with dependent signs (matras) for vowels other than inherent अ (का कि की कु कू कृ के कै को कौ), and consonants in the old phonetic grid, from क ख ग घ ङ through प फ ब भ म to य र ल व श ष स ह, plus ड़ and ढ़. Some Maithili spellings also use Bihari vowel letters ॳ ॴ ॵ and dependent signs ऺ ऻ ॆ ॊ ॏ.

Every consonant carries a built-in a, so म alone is ma. The virama ् removes it, and two consonants then join into a conjunct: क + ् + ष = क्ष, त + ् + र = त्र, प + ् + र = प्र. Alphabet charts often end with क्ष त्र ज्ञ, but those are joined pairs, typed as two letters with a virama between, not separate letters.

Maithili and Hindi share Devanagari, but some Maithili spellings also use Bihari-specific vowel letters and signs. "To be" is छी, छथि and अछि: हम ठीक छी "I am fine", ओ घर पर छथि "she is at home" (respectful), की हाल अछि? "how are things?". The possessive -क is joined to the word: मिथिलाक "of Mithila", अहाँक "your". And Maithili verbs change not only for who acts but also for how respectfully the speaker treats the people spoken to and about, a famously intricate system.

Special Maithili signs: ऽ, ँ and ड़ ढ़

The sign most typical of Maithili writing is the avagraha ऽ. In Sanskrit it marks a dropped a (सोऽहम्); in Maithili it is written after a word-final consonant to show that its a is fully pronounced, where Hindi would swallow it: कऽ "having done" (खा कऽ "after eating"), भऽ गेल "it became", लऽ "take", दऽ "give". Some people type an apostrophe instead (क', भ') when their keyboard has no easy way to enter ऽ; you can copy it here.

Maithili is full of nasal vowels, marked with the candrabindu ँ (moon and dot): अहाँ "you" (polite), कहाँ "where", पाँच "five". The anusvara ं (a dot alone) stands for a nasal before a consonant: संग "with", मंदिर "temple". When a matra already sits above the line, writers use the plain dot for both. The visarga ः appears only in Sanskrit words such as दुःख "sorrow".

ड़ and ढ़ are flaps: the tongue curls back and strikes once, like a quick r, as in बड़ "very, big" (बड़ नीक "very good") and पढ़ब "I will read". The dot under them is the nukta ़. Unicode can write each as one character (U+095C ड़, U+095D ढ़) or as ड / ढ followed by the nukta; they look the same, and normalization turns the single character into the two-part form.

Tirhuta (Mithilakshar): the Maithili script of Mithila

For centuries Maithili had a script of its own, Tirhuta, named after Tirhut, an old name of the region; Maithili speakers call it Mithilakshar, "the letters of Mithila". It is a sister of the Bengali and Assamese scripts rather than of Devanagari, and many letters look alike across the three. Scholars of Mithila copied Sanskrit and Maithili manuscripts in it, and families kept letters and genealogies in it; everyday accounts and court papers were often written in Kaithi instead (see the Bhojpuri collection). In the 20th century Devanagari replaced both for print and school.

Tirhuta entered Unicode in version 7.0 (2014), in the block U+11480–U+114DF, and fonts such as Noto Sans Tirhuta display it; without one you see empty boxes. Its basic consonant order follows Devanagari, but Tirhuta includes extra vowel forms, so match shared letters individually: 𑒏 is क, 𑒧 is म, 𑒁 is अ. Tirhuta adds separate signs for short e 𑒺 and short o 𑒽, opens texts with the invocation mark anji 𑒀, and ends sentences with the Devanagari danda । ॥, as it has none of its own. Volunteer literacy campaigns teach Mithilakshar again, and it is still used for formal wedding invitation cards and on some signboards in north Bihar, as a mark of Maithili pride.

How to type Maithili on a keyboard and phone

Maithili in Devanagari uses the Hindi keyboards. On Windows, add Hindi under Settings → Time & language → Language & region and choose a Devanagari INSCRIPT layout or the Hindi phonetic keyboard, where you type in Latin letters and pick the Devanagari word; switch with Win+Space. On a Mac, add Devanagari, Devanagari – QWERTY or Hindi – Transliteration under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources.

On a phone, add Hindi (or Maithili, where your keyboard app offers it) to Gboard or SwiftKey; transliteration lets you type ahan kehan chhi and pick अहाँ केहन छी from the suggestions. Copy anything the layout lacks, above all ऽ, । ॥ and the digits ० to ९, from this page.

Tirhuta is not on the standard Hindi keyboards. The simple ways are to copy letters from the tables here or to use a Devanagari-to-Tirhuta converter, which swaps each letter for its twin. In HTML any letter can be written by its code: म is म, ऽ is ऽ and 𑒏 is Tirhuta 𑒏.

Where Maithili is spoken

CLDR estimates about 20 million speakers of Maithili: about 17 million in India and 3.4 million in Nepal. India's 2011 census recorded about 13.6 million people who named it as their mother tongue. Its homeland is Mithila, the plain between the Ganga and the Himalayan foothills: north Bihar around Darbhanga, Madhubani, Sitamarhi, Samastipur, Saharsa and Supaul, and Nepal's eastern Terai around Janakpur, the city of King Janaka and Sita, with Dhanusha, Mahottari, Saptari and Siraha.

Maithili has been one of the scheduled languages of India's constitution since 2003, the only one of the Bihari languages to be listed, and it is the second most spoken language of Nepal after Nepali. Its closest relatives are Bhojpuri and Magahi; for the same Devanagari letters see also the Hindi, Nepali and Awadhi collections, for its script's sisters the Bangla and Assamese ones, and for flags and emoji the India and Nepal collections.