Gujarati is an
Indo-Aryan language, part of the greater Indo-European language family. It is
one of the 22 official languages and 14 regional languages of India. Gujarati 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. It
is also the language of the large Gujarati community in Mumbai, India. There
are about 46 million speakers of Gujarati worldwide, making it the 23rd most
spoken language in the world. Of these, 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.[1] A considerable population of Gujarati speakers exists in North
America and the United Kingdom as well. 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".
Linguistic of Gujarati evolved from Sanskrit
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: (1) Old IA (Vedic and Classical Sanskrit), (2) Middle IA
(various Prakrits and Apabhramshas), and (3) New IA (modern languages
such as Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, etc.). Another view can be presented in
terms of successive family, tree splits. According to this view,
Gujarati is assumed to have separated from other IA languages in three
stages: (1) IA languages split into Northern, Eastern, and Central
divisions based on the innovate characteristics such as stops becoming
voiced in the Northern and dental retroflex sibilants merging with the
palatal in the Eastern; (2) Central, in Gujarati/Rajasthani, Western
Hindi, and Punjabi/Lahanda/Sindhi, on the basis of innovation of
auxiliary verbs and postpositions in Gujarati/Rajasthani; and (3)
Gujarati/Rajasthani into Gujarati and Rajasthani through development of
such characteristics as auxiliary ch- and the possessive marker -n-
during the 15th century (Dave 1948, Pandit 1966).
Gujarati is customarily divided in the following three
historical stages: Old Gujarati (from the mid-12th century to 15th
century), Middle Gujarati (from the mid-15th century to the beginning of
the 19th century), and Modern Gujarati. What is labelled as Old
Gujarati, however, has been referred to differently by different
scholars. Tessitori (1914-1916), on the basis of 14 and 15th century
literary texts, came to the conclusion that at the time there was on a
single language covering the region currently occupied by Gujarati and
Rajasthani. He termed the common language Old Western Rajasthani.