Bihari

Bihari is a group of Eastern Indo-Aryan languages descended from ancient Magadhi Prakrit, spoken across Bihar, Jharkhand and the Nepalese Terai. Its chief members are Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili. Buddhist Siddha poets composed the twilight-language Charyapada verses here between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, the group's earliest literary trace.

Maithili became a court language under Mithila's Karnata dynasty. Jyotirishwar Thakur's early-fourteenth-century Varna Ratnakara is the first prose work in any modern Indian language, and Vidyapati, active from about 1360 to 1450, wrote Radha and Krishna songs that shaped Vaishnava poetry as far as Bengal. Bhojpuri gathered folk epics such as the Lorikayan between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, first written in Kaithi but later generally in Devanagari.