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Gujarati linguistic data
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Common questions about Gujarati
What linguistic data does this Gujarati page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Gujarati's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Gujarati data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
How does Gujarati's three-gender system compare to Hindi's two?
Gujarati keeps the Indo-Aryan masculine/feminine/neuter system that Hindi collapsed (Hindi merged neuter into masculine in most contexts). Adjectives, verbs, and many pronouns agree with the noun's gender. The neuter is partly arbitrary, partly tied to inanimacy or abstraction; many loanwords default to neuter.
Why does the Gujarati script lack the headline that Devanagari has?
The śiroreksā (top horizontal line that connects letters in Devanagari) was dropped in the Gujarati script around the 16th century, possibly to make commercial handwriting faster (Gujarat was a major mercantile region). The underlying letters and abugida structure are otherwise close to Devanagari, and a Devanagari reader can pick up Gujarati text with a few hours of practice.
Why is the similarity score with Marathi or Hindi high?
All three are Indo-Aryan, share SOV typology, postpositions, and split-ergative past patterns. Gujarati and Marathi both keep three genders; Gujarati and Hindi share more lexicon. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
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.