Gujarati

Gujarati is one of the twenty-two official languages and fourteen regional languages of India. It is spoken as a first language by the Gujarati people and as a second language by many people in neighboring states. Gujarati is part of the greater Indo-European language family. It is derived from Sanskrit and shares similarities with Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Punjabi. Gujarati is the 26th most widely spoken language in the world with about 46 million speakers. It is the official language of the Indian state of Gujarat and the union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. Gujarati is also spoken in Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uganda, and Zambia. The Gujarati script is derived from the Devanagari script and is part of the Brahmic family of scripts. The modern Gujarati script is a modification of the Devanagari script and has thirty-three letters in its alphabet. Gujarati is a left-branching language, meaning that subordinate clauses precede the main clause. Gujarati word order is also flexible, which allows speakers to focus on the most important information in a sentence. The grammar of Gujarati is similar to that of other Indo-Aryan languages. Gujarati has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), two numbers (singular and plural), and eight cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, locative, vocative, instrumental, and ablative). Gujarati has a rich literary tradition and is the home of some of the most important works of Indian literature. The Gujarati language is also used in the fields of science, technology, and medicine.