Gujarati

Introduction

Gujarati is a member of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Its closest relatives are Hindi and Punjabi. It is estimated that it is spoken as a first language by 45 million people in India, primarily in the state of Gujarat, and Pondichery Gujarat Map worldwide by 46 million people. Outside of India it is spoken in Bangladesh, Fiji, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Oman, Pakistan, Reunion, Singapore, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, United Kingdom, USA, Zambia, Zimbabwe (Ethnologue).

Like other Indo-Aryan languages, Gujarati is derived from Sanskrit through Prakrit, a large group of ancient Indic languages, and Apabhramsha, transitional dialects spoken in India between the 6th-13th centuries AD.

Gujart Temple The first grammar of a precursor of Gujarati was written in the 12th century. The first literary records of Gujarati were mostly religious verses dating back to the 17th century. The language was later cultivated by a number of writers, scholars, and poets from Narasimha Mehta to Mahatma Gandhi. The study of Gujarati in the 19th century can be credited to a British colonial administrator named Alexander Kinloch Forbes who explored much of the previous thousand years of the history of Gujarati and compiled a large number of manuscripts.

Click on the MLA Interactive Language Map to find out where Gujarati is spoken in the U.S.

Gujarati is one of the 22 official languages and 14 regional languages of India, and one of the minority languages of neighboring Pakistan. It is the medium of everyday communication in Gujarat. It is also used in education, government, business and the media. The language is widely spoken In expatriate Gujarati communities in the UK and the U.S. These communities have Gujarati newspapers, magazines, radio and television programs.

Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

was born in 1869, in Porbandar, Gujarat, He was an intellectual and spiritual leader who brought the cause of independence for British colonial India to world attention. His ideas of non-violent civil protest have influenced political movements throughout the world. Gandhi helped bring about India's independence from British rule, inspiring other colonial peoples to fight for their independence. Gandhi's principles of satya 'truth' and ahimsa 'non-violence inspired such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela.

Dialects

Ahmedabad

Gujara tBoys

Gujarati has many dialects. Little is known about their mutual intelligibility or about the linguistic differences among them. The major dialects are listed below:

Standard Gujarati (including the varieties spoken in Mumbai and Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat)
Surati
Kathiyawadi
Kharwa
Khakari
Tarimukhi
East African Gujarati

Northern Gujarati dialects have many loanwords from Arabic and Persian, while the southern dialects have more Hindi, English, and Portuguese borrowings. East African Gujarati has loanwords from the local languages, particularly Swahili.

Structure

Sound System

Gujarat Women

Gujarat Girls

Gujarat Woman

Vowels
Gujarati has ten vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. Vowels can be short or long. Vowel length is marked by a macron.

x	Front	Central	Back
High (close)	i - ī	x	u - ū
Mid	e - ē	x	o - ō
Low (open)	x	a - ā	x

Consonants
Gujarati consonants have the following distinguishing features:

There is a contrast between aspirated vs. unaspirated stops and affricates, including voiced ones, e.g., p—p, t—t, k—k, b—b, d—d, g—g. Aspirated consonants are produced with a strong puff of air.
There is a contrast between and apical vs. retroflex consonants, e.g., . Apical consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, whereas retroflex consonants are produced with the tongue curled, so that its underside comes in contact with the roof of the mouth.
There are several nasal consonants, including m, n, (retroflex), ñ (as in canyon), and (as in sing).
Consonant clusters are infrequent. They occur mostly in initial and medial position. Only a restricted set of consonant clusters can occur at the end of words.

Stress
Stress in Gujarati words normally falls on the penultimate syllable. If the penultimate vowel in a word with more than two syllables is schwa, stress falls on the preceding syllable.

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of Gujarati vowels and consonants.

Click here to listen to Library of Congress recordings of Suresh Dalal, one of the modern Gujarati's authors, as read by the writer in Gujarati.

Grammar

Gujarat Woman

Gujarat Girl

Gujarat Woman

Gujarati grammar is very much like that of other Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, Bengali, and Punjabi. Like all these languages, Gujarati is agglutinative, i.e., it adds suffixes to roots to build words and to express grammatical relations.

Nouns
Gujarati nouns are marked for the following grammatical categories:

number: singular and plural
gender: masculine, feminine, neuter
case: nominative, genitive, accusative-dative, instrumental, ablative, locative, and vocative; all cases, except vocative, are marked by postpositions.
there are no definite or indefinite articles
adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number and case

Verbs
Gujarati verbs agree with their subjects in person, number and gender (the latter in aspectual forms only)

person: 1st, 2nd, 3rd
number: singular and plural
tense: present, past, future
aspect: imperfective and perfective
mood: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, conditional
voice: active, passive

Word order
The normal word order in Gujarati is Subject - Object - Verb. Modifiers precede the nouns they modify. Indirect objects precede direct objects.

Vocabulary

Gujarat Man

Gujarat Woman

Gujarat Men

Gujarati has many Arabic and Persian loanwords due to more than five centuries of Islamic rule. This is particularly true of high-level vocabulary and is less representative of the spoken language. As a result of centuries of trade with European countries such as Portugal and England, Gujarati has also borrowed words from Portuguese and English.

Hello		namaste
Goodbye		aavjo
Thank you		shukria
Yes		ha
No		na

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of these words.

Below are the numbers 1-10 in Gujarati.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
ek	be	treñ	car	pãc	che	sat	ath	nev	des

Here is what these numbers look like in Gujarati script.

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of the numbers.

Writing

Gujarati Press

Gujarati is written in the Gujarati script, an abugida very similar to Devanagari but without the line at the top of the letters as in other Indo-Aryan alphabets. The earliest known document in the Gujarati script is a manuscript dating from the late 16th century. Until the 19th century, the Gujarati script was used mainly for writing letters and keeping accounts, while the Devanagari script was used in literary and academic texts. .

[k]

[kh]

[g]

[gh]

Click here for lessons in Gujarati script.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Gujarati script and in Romanization.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Resources

Click here to find out where Gujarati is taught in the United States.
Click here to find learning materials for studying Gujarati .

Online resources for the study of Gujarati
A pedagogic grammar of the Gujarati language
Some Gujarati Language Resources
Omniglot guide to Gujarati script
Yamada Center Language Guide for Gujarati
Gujarati Language Links
Gujarati Language Resources
Ethnologue report on Gujarati
UCLA language profile of Gujarati
Wikipedia article on Gujarati language