Maithili and the Languages We Let Die

Maithili is spoken by 30 million people. It has a literature spanning centuries. Poets, philosophers, theologians wrote in Maithili.

Yet most of them know Hindi instead. And many younger generations don't know Maithili at all.

This bothered me. Why do we let languages die when they carry entire worlds?

My father speaks Maithili. I grew up hearing it. But I never learned to write it, never read its literature. I absorbed it passively, like most.

When you lose a language, you lose:

• A unique way of seeing the world
• Jokes that don't translate
• Concepts that can't be expressed in other languages
• A connection to ancestors

Maithili has words for emotions and experiences that Hindi doesn't capture. Philosophy embedded in grammar. History in vocabulary.

This is why I'm learning it now. Not just to communicate with elders, but to access what's carried in the language itself.

It's also a lesson for tech. We're increasingly monolingual online. English, Python, JavaScript. These are tools. Useful. But if they're only tools, we lose diversity of thought.

The most innovative ideas come from different mental models. Language is the scaffolding of thought.

Learning Maithili is learning to think differently. And that's worth preserving.