Gujarati · ગુજરાતી

About Gujarati

Language family

Indo-European, Indo-Aryan

Where it's spoken

Gujarat, India, with a large global diaspora

Speakers

roughly 60 million speakers

Gujarati descends from the same Sanskrit-rooted Indo-Aryan dialects as Hindi and Marathi, and its script is a cursive-derived variant of Devanagari missing the characteristic horizontal top line. It was Mahatma Gandhi's native language and the language of much of his early political writing. A long history of Gujarati merchant trade across the Indian Ocean built especially large diaspora communities in East Africa, the UK, and North America.