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How Marathi packages meaning

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Marathi grammar at a glance

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Common questions about Marathi

How does Marathi mark who's doing the action?
Verb suffixes carry person, number, AND gender of the subject. मी बोलतो (I-speak.M.1SG) vs मी बोलते (I-speak.F.1SG) is the same speaker, different gender. The pronoun is often dropped because the suffix already identifies the subject.
Are there articles like English 'the' and 'a' in Marathi?
No. Specificity comes from context, demonstratives (हा 'this', तो 'that'), or word order. A bare noun like पुस्तक can mean 'a book', 'the book', or 'books' depending on what surrounds it.
What's special about the past tense?
Transitive past-tense verbs trigger the ergative pattern: the subject takes the postposition ने and the verb stops agreeing with the subject and starts agreeing with the object. Intransitive past-tense verbs keep normal subject agreement, and the architecture page shows the contrast directly.
Does Marathi have grammatical gender?
Three genders — masculine, feminine, neuter. Gender shows up on the verb, on adjectives, and on agreeing demonstratives. The speaker's own gender even changes the verb form when they refer to themselves.
Where does information live in a Marathi sentence?
The verb sits at the end (SOV), recipients and locations ride postpositions like ला, त, मध्ये after the noun, and possession uses चा / ची / चे agreeing with the possessed item. Almost every grammatical relation is marked by something attached to or following the noun, not preceding it.

Sources for Marathi

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.

  1. Dhongde, R. V. & Wali, K. (2009). Marathi. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (London Oriental and African Language Library 13).
  2. Pandharipande, R. V. (1997). Marathi. London: Routledge (Descriptive Grammars).
  3. Joshi, Smita (1989). "Morphological Causativization in Marathi." Stanford University.
  4. Hook, Peter Edwin & Pardeshi, Prashant (2013). "Prenominal Participial Phrases in Marathi." Lingua Posnaniensis 55(2).
  5. WALS Online — features for Marathi (wals_code mhi), citing Pandharipande 1997.
  6. Lele, Kaushik. Learn Marathi with Kaushik (learnmarathiwithkaushik.com).

See all data sources and dataset-level citations for the broader bibliography.

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