Mithilakshar (also known as Tirhuta) is the traditional script of the Maithili language, which is is spoken in the Indian state of Bihar and eastern Nepal. The language has a rich history spanning thousands of years, but years of official neglect by the Bihar government and migration have taken their toll on the use of the Mithilakshar script. Most speakers of the language have switched to using the Devanagari script which is used for neighboring languages such as Hindi. As a result, the number of people with knowledge of Mithilakshar has dropped considerably in recent years. Writing Systems of the World today A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... Maithili is of the family of Indo-Aryan languages, which are part of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. ... For other uses, see Bihar (disambiguation). ... च् + छ = च्छ Devanagari in Unicode The Unicode range for Devanagari is U+0900 . ... Hindi (हिन्दी) is a language spoken mainly in North and Central India. ...

The script is extremely similar to the Bengali script, as they both evolved simultaneously as regional variants of the Eastern Nagari script. The Bengali script is an Abugida system of writing belonging to the Brahmic family of scripts whose use is associated with the Bangla, Assamese, Manipuri and Sylheti languages. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas used in South Asia and Southeast Asia. ...

The first two images shown below are two samples illustrating the history of Mithilakshar. The first is the sacred sign of Ganesha used for millennia by students before beginning Mithilakshar studies. Displayed further below are images of tables comparing the Mithilakshar and Devanagari scripts. Currently, a Unicode standard for Mithilakshar is being developed. In Hinduism, Ganesha (Sanskrit: गणेश or श्रीगणेश ( ) (when used to distinguish lordly status) (or lord of the hosts, also spelled as Ganesa and Ganesh, often also referred to as Ganapati) is one of the most well-known and venerated representations of God (Brahman). ... Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...