total population of India, as many Maithili speakers view it as a dialect of Hindi and report their mother tongue as Hindi. In Nepal, it is spoken in the eastern Terai, and is the second most prevalent language of Nepal. Tirhuta was formerly the primary script for written Maithili. Less commonly, it was also written in the local variant of Kaithi. Today it is written in the Devanagari script. In 2003, Maithili was included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution as a recognised regional language of India, which allows it to be used in education, government, and other official contexts. Urdu Other languages and dialects of Bihar Angika Angika or Southern Maithili is mainly spoken in Anga area which includes Munger, Bhagalpur and Banka districts of Bihar and the Santhal Pargana division of Jharkhand. Its speakers are estimated to be around 15 million. In addition to the Anga area, it is also spoken in some parts of Purnia district of Bihar. However, in Purnia, it is a minority language as Purnia has a Maithil majority. Angika is classified as a dialect of Maithili by George A. Grierson in the Linguistic Survey of India (1903), although its speakers often perceive it as a distinct language. Bajjika Bajjika or Western Maithili is spoken in eastern India and Nepal. It is considered to be a dialect of the Maithili language due to certain political bias despite being a language with a vast vocabulary, grammar Bajjika is spoken in the north-western part of Bihar which mostly spans the modern day Tirhut Division and thus is also referred to as Tirhutiya. In Bihar, it is mainly spoken in the Samastipur, Sitamarhi, Muzaffarpur, Vaishali, Sheohar districts. It is also spoken in a part of the Darbhanga district adjoining Muzaffarpur and Samastipur districts. Researcher Abhishek Kashyap (2013), based on the 2001 census data, estimated that there were 20 million Bajjika speakers in Bihar (including around 11.46 illiterate adults). Bhojpuri Bhojpuri has several dialects: Southern Bhojpuri, Northern Bhojpuri, Western Bhojpuri, and Nagpuria. Southern Standard Bhojpuri is prevalent in the old Shahabad district (Buxar, Bhojpur, Rohtas, and Kaimur districts) and the Saran region (Saran, Siwan and Gopalganj districts) in Bihar, and the eastern Azamgarh (Ballia and Mau districts) and Varanasi (eastern part of Ghazipur district) regions in Uttar Pradesh. The dialect is also known as Kharwari. It can be further divided into Shahabadi, Chhaprahiya and Pachhimahi. Northern