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How Gujarati packages meaning
Gujarati grammar at a glance
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Common questions about Gujarati
What makes Gujarati's gender system different?
Gujarati has three grammatical genders — masculine, feminine, and neuter — unlike Hindi's two. Gender surfaces on the verb (હું બોલ્યો/બોલી/બોલ્યું), on adjectives, and on demonstratives (આ/આ/આ). The speaker's own gender changes first-person verb forms. Neuter nouns like ઘર (ghar, 'house') trigger distinct agreement from both masculine and feminine.
How does the split-ergative pattern work in Gujarati?
In non-perfective tenses, the verb agrees with the subject normally. In the perfective, the subject takes the ergative postposition -એ (-e) and the verb switches to agree with the object instead. So 'the boy opened the book' has the verb agreeing with 'book' (object), not 'boy' (subject). Intransitive perfective verbs keep normal subject agreement.
Does Gujarati have articles like 'the' and 'a'?
No articles. Specificity comes from context, demonstratives like આ (ā, 'this') and પેલું (pelũ, 'that'), and the presence or absence of the postposition -ને on objects — objects marked with -ને are interpreted as specific or definite. Bare nouns are ambiguous between definite and indefinite readings.
Is Gujarati SOV or SVO?
Gujarati is SOV by default — the verb comes at the end. But word order is more flexible than in Hindi because postpositions clearly mark each noun's role. The -ને postposition on specific objects and the -એ postposition on ergative subjects mean you can rearrange constituents for emphasis without losing who-did-what-to-whom.
How many politeness levels does Gujarati have?
Two practical levels: તું (tũ, informal/intimate) and તમે (tame, formal/polite). Each triggers different verb agreement. A third level with આપ (āp) exists in formal or literary contexts but is rarely used in everyday speech. Unlike Maithili, politeness is encoded in the subject agreement only — it doesn't extend to the object.
Sources for Gujarati
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Cardona, George and Babu Suthar. 2003. "Gujarati." In The Indo-Aryan Languages, ed. G. Cardona and D. Jain. London: Routledge.
- Lambert, H.M. 1971. Gujarati Language Course. Cambridge University Press.
- Masica, Colin P. 1991. The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge University Press.
- Mistry, P.J. 1997. "Gujarati." In The Major Languages of South Asia, ed. B. Comrie. London: Routledge.