Gujarat Languages

Gujarati is the native language of the west Indian state of Gujarat. There are three colloquial languages of Gujarat-Gujarati, Urdu and Sindhi.

The Gujarati language is an Indo-Aryan language. The Gujarati language is part of the greater Indo-European language family. The Gujarati language is descended from the Sanskrit language.

The origin of Gujarati language in tangible form was first detected in a manuscript which was supposedly written in 1592. The first commercial appearance was in a printed 1797 advertisement.

In the 19th Century, the Gujarati language was primarily used for commercial correspondence like writing letters and keeping business accounts.

The Gujarati language have certain unique features:

• Gujarati script was primarily known as a business person's preferred lingo- saraphi (banker's), vanijasai's (merchant's) and mahajani ( trader's) script.
  
  
• Gujarati language is a syllabic alphabet in that consonants have a syllabic vowel.

The vowels of the Gujarati language can be written as independent letters, or by employing a variety of diacritical marks that are written above, below, before or after the consonant they belong.

As with all languages, the Gujarati language comes in numerous regional dialects which differs in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Some dialects are influenced by west Asian languages while others are influenced by European languages like English and Portuguese.

The Gujarati language is a left branching language. Adjectives are used before nouns; direct objects precede verbs and there are postpositions. The word order of the Gujarati language is SOV and there are three genders and two numbers.

Some common phrases are translated for your benefit:

• Hello: Namaste
• Yes: Ha
• No: Na
• Fig: Anjeer

Last Updated on : 30 September 2011