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Marathi linguistic data
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Common questions about Marathi
What linguistic data does this Marathi page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits (retroflex, ejective, click, uvular, pharyngeal), vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Marathi's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Marathi 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.
Is Marathi tonal?
No. Marathi has no phonemic tones. The segmental contrast that does the heavy lifting is the four-way stop series — voiceless, voiceless-aspirated, voiced, voiced-aspirated — together with a retroflex/dental distinction across most consonant places of articulation.
How many genders does Marathi have, and how do they affect the grammar?
Three: masculine, feminine, and neuter — one more than Hindi. Adjectives, verbs, and many pronouns agree with the noun's gender. Under the split-ergative past, agreement flips to the object, so gender propagates through the verb in a different direction in past-transitive sentences than in present ones.
Why does the similarity score against English come out low?
The score combines shared genetic ancestry, typological feature overlap, and historical lexical borrowing. Marathi and English are both Indo-European, but their last common ancestor was about 4,000 years ago, their typology disagrees on word order, case, and adposition direction, and there has been almost no direct lexical borrowing between them. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions weigh most.
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.
- Dhongde, R. V. & Wali, K. (2009). Marathi. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (London Oriental and African Language Library 13).
- Pandharipande, R. V. (1997). Marathi. London: Routledge (Descriptive Grammars).
- Joshi, Smita (1989). "Morphological Causativization in Marathi." Stanford University.
- Hook, Peter Edwin & Pardeshi, Prashant (2013). "Prenominal Participial Phrases in Marathi." Lingua Posnaniensis 55(2).
- WALS Online — features for Marathi (wals_code mhi), citing Pandharipande 1997.
- Lele, Kaushik. Learn Marathi with Kaushik (learnmarathiwithkaushik.com).