Gujarati

Mostly in Gujarat and adjoining regions of Maharashtra, plus the Indian union territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Internationally, Gujarati communities are prominent in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, East Africa (especially Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda), and parts of southern Africa. The Gujarati diaspora is one of the largest and most economically active among Indian languages.

An abugida derived from Devanagari but distinguished by the absence of the top horizontal line (shirorekha) that connects letters in Hindi or Marathi. Without the headline, individual letters look more separated and rounded. The script is otherwise structurally similar to Devanagari and shares most of its consonant and vowel inventory.

Yes — masculine, feminine, and neuter. Most modern Indo-Aryan languages have collapsed to two genders, but Gujarati and Marathi preserve the older three-gender system inherited from Sanskrit. Verbs, adjectives, and some postpositions agree with the noun, and the same noun-class endings carry through complex sentences.

Same Indo-Aryan family, similar grammatical structure (postpositions, SOV order, gender agreement, split-ergative past), but the two are not mutually intelligible. Gujarati uses different verb endings, has the extra neuter gender, and its script — though related — looks different on the page. Speakers of one usually need study to follow the other.

The script can be learned in a couple of weeks. The grammar is the standard Indo-Aryan shape: postpositions, SOV order, gender agreement, ergative past. The third gender (neuter) and eight cases add some complexity beyond Hindi. Vocabulary is largely Sanskritic with English loanwords increasingly common in urban speech.