Rangpuri language

Rajbanshi
Native to	India, Bangladesh, Nepal
Native speakers	2,982,280
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indic (Indo-Aryan) Eastern Zone Bengali-Assamese Rajbanshi
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: rjs – Rajbanshi rkt – Kamta (India) / Rangpuri (Bangladesh)

Rajbanshi is an Eastern Indic language spoken in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal.

Rajbanshi belongs to the Indo-European language family. According to a 1991 census, it was spoken by 3 million people.

Other names of the language are Kamtapuri, Rajbangsi, Rajbansi, Rajbongshi, Tajpuri.

Dialects

The main dialects are Western Rajbanshi, Central Rajbanshi, Eastern Rajbanshi and Rajbanshi Hills also known as Koch language.

The central dialect has majority of speakers and is quite uniform. There are publications in this language. The western dialect has more diversity. Lexical similarity is 77% to 89% between the three dialects. But the one spoken in the hills has some influence of the local tribal languages and differs quite a bit from the other three. Rajbanshi also shares 48% to 55% of its vocabulary with Hindi, and 43% to 49% with Nepali. More essentially it can be called as eastern dialect of Maithili as the ancient Mithila kingdom included the areas speaking Rajbanshi

External links

• A complete reference grammar of the Rajbanshi language