Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language descending from Sanskrit, and part of the greater Indo-European language family. It is native to the Indian state of Gujarat, and is its chief language, as well as of the adjacent union territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli.

There are about 46 million speakers of Gujarati worldwide, making it the 26th most spoken native language in the world. Along with Romany and Sindhi, it is among the most western of Indo-Aryan languages. Gujarati was the first language of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the "Father of India", Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the "Father of Pakistan" and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the "Iron Man of India".

History

Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi, two prime political figures of the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century, were Gujaratis and thus native speakers of the Gujarati language. For Jinnah, Gujarati did not factor beyond that of a mother tongue. He was neither born nor raised in Gujarat, and Gujarat did not end up a part of Pakistan, the country he founded. He went on to advocate for solely Urdu in his politics. For Gandhi, Gujarati served as a medium of literary expression. He helped to inspire a renewal in its literature, and in 1936 he introduced the current spelling convention at the Gujarati Literary Society's 12th meeting.Gujarati is a modern Indo-Aryan language evolved from Sanskrit. The traditional practice is to differentiate the IA languages on the basis of three historical stages:

• Old IA (Vedic and Classical Sanskrit)
• Middle IA (various Prakrits and Apabhramshas)
• New IA (modern languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, etc.)

Another view accords successive family, tree splits, in which Gujarati is assumed to have separated from other IA languages in four stages:

• IA languages split into Northern, Eastern, and Western divisions based on the innovate characteristics such as stops becoming voiced in the Northern (Skt. danta "tooth" > Punj. dānd) and dental and retroflex sibilants merging with the palatal in the Eastern (Skt. sandhya "evening" > Beng. śājh)
• Western, into Central and Southern.
• Central, in Gujarati/Rajasthani, Western Hindi, and Punjabi/Lahanda/Sindhi, on the basis of innovation of auxiliary verbs and postpositions in Gujarati/Rajasthani.
• Gujarati/Rajasthani into Gujarati and Rajasthani through development of such characteristics as auxiliary ch- and the possessive marker -n- during the 15th century.

Demographics and Distribution

Of the approximately 46 million speakers of Gujarati, roughly 45.5 million reside in India, 150 000 in Uganda, 250 000 in Tanzania, 50 000 in Kenya and roughly 100 000 in Pakistan. There is also a large Gujarati community in Mumbai, India.

The United Kingdom has 300,000 speakers, many of them situated in the London areas of Wembley, Harrow and Newham and in Leicester, Coventry and Bradford. A considerable population exists in North America as well. There are estimated to be at least 1,500 Gujarati-speaking people in Minnesota.

Besides being spoken by the Gujarati people, non-Gujarati residents of and migrants to the state of Gujarat also count as speakers, among them Hindu Sindhi refugees from Pakistan, the Kutchis (as a literary language), and the Parsis (adopted as a mother tongue).

Official status

Gujarati is one of the 22 official languages and 14 regional languages of India. It is officially recognized in the state of Gujarat, India.

Dialects

Gujarati comes in numerous regional dialects that differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and/or grammar. Some dialects have many Arabic and Persian borrowings, while others, such as the southern dialects, take more from Portuguese and English, while others take more from Hindi.

Source:
"Gujarati language." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.