Gujarati

Gujarati is a language spoken in western India, particularly in the state of Gujarat, which is located on India’s western coast.

Gujarati is also used to mean the speakers of this language and the citizens of Gujarat.

Gujarati is an Indic language, coming from the same language family as Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, and many other languages spoken in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.  According to the 2011 Indian Census, Gujarati is spoken as a first language by over 55 million people and is the sixth most popular language in India. Nearly 4.6 percent of the Indian population speaks Gujarati as a first language.

Relative to the other languages spoken in India, Gujarati is a young language, tracing back only to the 1100s. The earliest form of written Gujarati appeared in the 1185 narrative poem Bharateśvara-bāhubali-rāsa by Śālibhadra.

Like several other Indian languages, spoken Gujarati is heavily based on Sanskrit and written Gujarati is based on the Devanagari script used by other Indic languages. Gujarati is written from left to right with an alphabet of 47 letters.

The first records of the term Gujarati come from around 1600. It comes from the Sanskrit Gurjara, the name for the area of Gujarat. The word Gurjara comes from the Gurjaras, one of two dynasties that ruled over what is now northern and western India from the 500s to 800s.

Today, Gujarati has a variety of different dialects. The dialect a person speaks depends on many factors, including religion, geographic area, culture, and ethnicity. Generally speaking, the northern dialects spoken by people such as the Parsee borrow words from Persian and Arabic. The southern dialects, by contrast, borrow words from Hindi, English, and Portuguese.

While Gujarati is mostly spoken in India, especially in Gujarat, speakers of the language have spread throughout the globe. Gujarati speakers are estimated to live in 129 different countries and have the widest spread of any group of Indian language speakers. In the United States, over 20 percent of Indian-Americans are Gujarati speakers.

Although he was fluent in several languages, Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi spoke Gujarati as his first language. Gandhi was born in the city of Porbandar in what is now the state of Gujarat in 1869.

This image shows a passage of the Christian Bible written in Gujarati.

On English social media, Gujarati is unsurprisingly most familiar to people of South Asian heritage.

We are a nation of eleven official languages that also celebrates other languages commonly used by various communities in South Africa, including German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Portuguese, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

— Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 (@CyrilRamaphosa) September 24, 2020

ipl is for what I'm excited for
but after our gujarati special stream 😁❤️
See you all tomorrow at 4pm

— Ketan Patel (@ketan1811) September 17, 2020

• India
• Indic
• language
• Gujarat
• Hindi
• Devanagari
• Sanskrit

True or False?

Gujarati is a language spoken primarily in Gujarat, a nation located in western India.