Marathi

Around 83 million people speak Marathi, almost all in India — primarily Maharashtra, where it's the official state language, and parts of neighbouring Goa, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh. Diaspora communities in the United States, the Gulf, and East Africa add a smaller global presence.

Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language, the same branch as Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, and Gujarati. One step further out it belongs to the Indo-European family, so it shares deep roots with European languages like English and Russian, though the connection is distant.

Marathi is written in Devanagari, the same script used for Hindi and Sanskrit, with a few extra letters of its own (most notably ळ and ऱ). The script is an abugida: each consonant carries an inherent vowel sound, modified by attached vowel marks.

No. Marathi and Hindi are separate languages — both Indo-Aryan, both written in Devanagari, but with different vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Marathi has three grammatical genders (Hindi has two), uses different verb endings, and has an ergative past tense system Hindi does not share in the same form.

It is a different shape from English. The script and the SOV word order take adjustment, and the three-gender system plus split-ergative past tense have no direct English parallel. But Marathi spelling is regular, the language is mostly pro-drop, and verbs follow predictable patterns once the agreement rules click.