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Gujarati language

Indo-Aryan language

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Through Gujarat, South Asia and Pakistan

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Gujarati, along with Meitei (alias Manipuri), hold the third place among the fastest growing languages of India, following Hindi (first place) and Kashmiri language (second place), according to the 2011 census of India.

Outside of Gujarat, Gujarati is spoken in many other parts of South Asia by Gujarati migrants, especially in Mumbai and Pakistan (mainly in Karachi). Gujarati is also widely spoken in many countries outside South Asia by the Gujarati diaspora. In North America, Gujarati is one of the fastest-growing and most widely spoken Indian languages in the United States (especially in New Jersey and New York City) and Canada. In Europe, Gujaratis form the second largest of the British South Asian speech communities, and Gujarati is the fourth most commonly spoken language in the UK's capital, of London. Gujarati is also spoken in Southeast Africa, particularly in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and South Africa. Elsewhere, Gujarati is spoken to a lesser extent in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and Middle Eastern countries such as Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.

History

Gujarati (sometimes spelled Gujerati, Gujarathi, Guzratee, Guujaratee, Gujrathi, and Gujerathi) is a modern Indo-Aryan (IA) 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)
  3. New IA (modern languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, etc.)

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

  1. IA languages split into Northern, Eastern, and Western divisions based on the innovate characteristics such as plosives 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).
  2. Western, into Central and Southern.
  3. Central, in Gujarati/Rajasthani, Western Hindi, and Punjabi/Lahanda/Sindhi, on the basis of innovation of auxiliary verbs and postpositions in Gujarati/Rajasthani.
  4. Gujarati/Rajasthani into Gujarati and Rajasthani through development of such characteristics as auxiliary ch- and the possessive marker -n- during the 15th century.

The principal changes from the Middle Indo-Aryan stage are the following:

Phonological changes

Changes in common with other New Indo-Aryan languages

  • Reduction of geminates to single consonants with lengthening of previous vowel (sometimes with spontaneous nasalisation) (#NIA-1/2)
  • Loss of final vowels (#NIA-3)
  • Lengthening of vowel in -VNC- sequences and consequent nasalisation (#NIA-4)
  • Loss of unaccented vowels in non-final positions common (#NIA-5)
  • Vowels in direct succession coalesce into long vowels or form diphthongs (#NIA-6)
    • Coalescence of vowels of like quality (#NIA-6a)
    • With unlike vowels, the first vowel is generally dominant (#NIA-6b)
    • aï and aü eventually become ε and ɔ (#NIA-6b-3)
  • Retroflextion of lateral approximant: -l- > -ḷ- (#SD-1c)
  • Exception to #NIA-1 when a long vowel follows the geminate and the word is longer than two syllables (#SD-2)

Morphology and Syntax

Gujarati is then customarily divided into the following three historical stages:

Old Gujarati

Old Gujarātī (જૂની ગુજરાતી; 1200 CE–1500 CE), which descended from Prakrit and the ancestor of modern Gujarati and Rajasthani, was spoken by the Gujjars, who were residing and ruling in Gujarat, Punjab, Rajputana, and central India. The language was used as a literary language as early as the 12th century. Texts of this era display characteristic Gujarati features, such as direct/oblique noun forms, postpositions, and auxiliary verbs. It had three genders, as Gujarati does today, and by around the time of 1300 CE, a fairly standardised form of this language emerged. While generally known as Old Gujarati, some scholars prefer the name Old Western Rajasthani, based upon the argument that Gujarati and Rajasthani were not yet distinct. Factoring into this preference was the belief that modern Rajasthani sporadically expressed a neuter gender, based on the incorrect conclusion that the [ũ] that came to be pronounced in some areas for masculine [o] after a nasal consonant was analogous to Gujarati's neuter [ũ]. A formal grammar, Prakrita Vyakarana, of the precursor to this language, Gurjar Apabhraṃśa, was written by the Jain monk and eminent scholar Acharya Hemachandra Suri, in the reign of Chaulukya king Jayasimha Siddharaja of Anhilwara (Patan).

Middle Gujarati

Middle Gujarati (AD 1500–1800) split off from Rajasthani, and developed the phonemes ɛ and ɔ, the auxiliary stem ch-, and the possessive marker -n-. Major phonological changes characteristic of the transition between Old and Middle Gujarati are:

  • i, u develop to ə in open syllables
  • diphthongs əi, əu change to ɛ and ɔ in initial syllables and to e and o elsewhere
  • əũ develops to ɔ̃ in initial syllables and to ű in final syllables

These developments would have grammatical consequences. For example, Old Gujarati's instrumental-locative singular in -i was levelled and eliminated, having become the same as Old Gujarati's nominative/accusative singular in -ə.

Modern Gujarati (1800–present)

A major phonological change was the deletion of final ə, such that the modern language has consonant-final words. Grammatically, a new plural marker of -o developed. In literature, the third quarter of the 19th century saw a series of milestones for Gujarati, which previously had verse as its dominant mode of literary composition. In the 1920s, the efforts to standardise Gujarati were carried out.

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