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Gujarati language is the official language of Gujarat state. It is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the majority of speakers. The Gujarati language is spoken in the state of Gujarat and Gujaratis are settled in various parts of India as well as in Asia, Africa and other countries of the world. The Gujarati spoken in the former PaTaN kingdom was accepted as the standard, but at present the speech form of the Nagar Brahmins of Amdavad is considered the standard colloquial Dialect mainly spoken in the area extending from Vadodara and its environs north-westernly to and including Amdavad. There are four other major dialects viz., 1) Surti, named after the Southern Gujarat city of Surat, ii) Kathiawadi, spoken in Kathiawad, Saurashtra, iii) Patani, Northern dialect named after the city Patan and iv) Charotari, spoken in Charotar, Kheda area.
Position of Gujarati in the Indo-Aryan branch is a result of successive splits of the one Indo-Aryan language community viz., separation of the eastern branch(Bangali, Assamese and Oriya) and northern and north-western branch(Sindhi- Kacchi, Panjabi-Lahnda and Pahari languages). This separation of two major offshoots of the Indo-Aryan branch, Western(Gujarati, Rajasthani and Bhili), Southern(Marathi and Konkani) and Central(western Hindi) branch is further split. Of this western region Bhili seperates earlier and Gujarati and dialects of Rajasthani are separated later on. The separation of Gujarati from these neighbouring dialects may be about 600 to 700 years old. The territorial boundaries of Gujarati were roughly marked of by this time; the RuN of Cutch and the Aravalli mountain range provided the north-western and northern boundaries, the mountains, hilly and forest tracts occupied by the Bhils formed the north-eastern, eastern and south-eastern boundaries and the sea-coast on the west formed the natural boundary.
The linguistic features in the present day Gujarati shows that the innovating areas in the last 200 or 300 years have been the regions around Amdavad, while earlier it had been in Southern Saurashtra. The dialects of mainland could be mainly divided (probably by the zones created by the rivers) as northern region between Banas and Sabarmati, central region between Sabarmati and Narmada and southern region beyond Narmada and south of Tapi.
The Gujarati script is related to the Devanagari script with which Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi are written. In the Gujarati script, the series of letters/graphemes represent a series of syllables (unites of pronunciation consisting of a vowel alone or of a vowel with one or more consonants) consisting of either a vowel syllable or a consonant vowel syllable. The script is written from left to right. The letters/graphemes are formed with predominately downward strokes of the pen i.e. the alignment, arrangement in a straight line of the letters/graphemes is made from the top downwards. These letters/graphemes are with a vertical line/stroke or rounded. Vowel graphemes represent vowel syllables and consonant graphemes represent a syllable consisting of a consonant and the vowel ‘a’ known as the “inherent vowel”. This vowel may be cancelled by writing a stroke (halant) at the foot of a consonant grapheme.
1.Generic Indo-European Languages > Indo-Aryan Languages. 2.Typological; Typologically, Gujarati is an inflexional analytic language. 3.Areal.
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