CASTE AND SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION OF SPEECH IN BIHAR

Abstract

Many early surveys have reported differences between Brahmin and non-Brahmin castes such as in Bloch (1910), Aiyer (1932), Andronov (1962), Bright and Ramanujan (1964), Pillai (1965, 1966, 1968) and McCormack, (1960) among others. On the other hand, sociolinguistic surveys have suggested that caste cannot be understood in isolation. The present work is a first attempt to revisit the caste-based differentiation in the speech by drawing data from Maithili, spoken in Bihar.
The variable under investigation is Variation in person marking: the alternation between honorific and non-honorific forms (honorific [ainh] ~non-honorific [-ai] forms). The findings suggest that though caste turned out to be significant, it cannot be interpreted in isolation; it interacts with other social factors.