GUJARATI LANGUAGE

Indo-Aryan language that is spoken in Gujarat state and in the neighbouring states of Maharashtra and Rajasthan in India; it is the official language of Gujarat. It had more than 40 million speakers in the late 20th century. Gujarati has several dialects, including those of the south, the northwest, and Saurashtra. The standard language accords with the central dialect, spoken in such cities as Vadodara. The language, which is written in a cursive modified Devanagari script, has a long literary tradition that dates back to the 12th century. Old Gujarati was also dubbed Old Western Rajasthani by the Italian scholar Tessitori, because the language was in his day used in an area including part of what is now the state of Rajasthan. Gujarati has a fairly complex inflectional system, marking, for instance, three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter; Hindi has only masculine and feminine), two numbers, and three cases (nominative, oblique, and agentive-locative) for nouns.