Whenever they meet me, they ask “Do you speak Bihari? Is that your mother tongue?”
“No, I don’t”, my perennial reply. I aggravate their perplexity by saying
“I don’t speak Bihari. Bihari is not even a language. It’s my geographical identity.”
1/n

“But we have heard that Bihari people speak Bihari language. This is what even #Bollywood confirms to us. Now you are saying you don’t speak Bihari. Then which language do you speak?”

“Well, #Bollywood doesn’t care for research. It feeds or reinforces sellable lies.” I”
2/n

“I speak #Bhojpuri, it is my mother-tongue. But Biharis speak other languages too. #Bhojpuri is just one of them. Let me tell you some other languages of Bihar. Maithili, Magahi, Angika or Vajjika are few of the languages spoken in Bihar.”
They look confused.
3/n

I aggravate it further. “When Jharkhand was part of Bihar we had several rich tribal languages, like Santhli, Mundari, Kurukshetra or Ho.”
They have not heard these names before. They are in a quandary. Their aim was to make fun of my accent by stating that I speak Bihari.
4/n

Now they don’t know how to react to these facts. I continue. “Jharkhand is also linguistically very rich. They speak Santhali, Munda,Indo-Aryan, even Dravidian languages. Korea, Oraon and Paharia are few Dravidian languages.”
5/n

“Paharia language is a varied Dravidian-Indo Aryan language. I still consider these languages as Bihari languages. It is my personal belief. It has nothing to do with geopolitics.”
They are quite. They want to change the subject. I guess they want to talk about Lalu Yadav.
6/n

But I don’t want to change the topic. So I continue. “You know, it was an Irish, named George Grierson, who while doing the first linguistic survey of India, in modern sense, grouped all the languages of Bihar into a single category and named it Bihari languages”
7/n

“This is how the languages spoken in that particular geography came to known as Bihari language(s). Again, Bihari isn’t a language, it’s a geographical identity.”
They look exasperated. They wanted to make fun of my Hindi accent which is heavily influenced by my L1.
8/n

But now they have missed the chance. They want to order some coffee. I too want to have my . May be next time I’ll discuss about the L1 influence over L2 and why Lalu Yadav’s accent is an exceptional one.