Attracted to the study of largely Sino-Tibetan hill languages of Nepal, most Western writer have either neglected the plains language completely or else lumped them together as 'dialects' of the languages of north Indian states. This paper is an attempt to describe the linguistic markers of definiteness in Maithili - an Indo-Aryan language spoken by 24.3 million 'first language speakers' in the eastern and northern regions of the Bihar state of India and the south eastern plains, known as the Tarai of Nepal.
