Saurashtra language

Saurashtra
Region	Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala (India)
Native speakers	190,000 (2001 census)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Western Indo-Aryan Gujarati Saurashtra
Writing system	Saurashtra, Latin, Devanagari, Tamil
Language codes
ISO 639-3	saz
Glottolog	saur1248[2]

Saurashtra is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Saurashtrian community of Gujarat who migrated and settled in South India. Madurai in Tamil Nadu has the highest number of people belonging to this community and also remains as their cultural center.

The language is largely only in spoken form even though the language has its own script. The lack of schools teaching Saurashtra script and the language is often cited as a reason for the very few number of people who actually know to read and write in Saurashtra script. Latin, Devanagari or Tamil script is used as alternative for Saurashtra Script by many Saurashtrians.

Census of India places the language under Gujarati. Official figures show the number of speakers as 185,420 (2001 census).^[3]

Writing System

Saurashtra Script

The letter order of Saurashtra script is similar to other Brahmic Scripts. The letters are vowels, consonants, and the compound letters which are formed essentially by adding a vowel sound to a consonant.

Vowels and Consonants

Compound Letters

Numerals

Sounds

The phoneme inventory of Saurashtra is similar to that of many other Indo-Aryan languages, especially that of the Konkani language. An IPA chart of all contrastive sounds in Saurashtra is provided below.

Loanwords in Saurashtra

The language itself is more similar to modern day Hindi and Marathi. However, in the course of migration to South India, the language was influenced by Dravidian Languages such as Telugu and Kannada and accumulated words from those language in its vocabulary as loanwords.

Geographical distribution

Speakers of the Saurashtra language, known as Saurashtrians, maintain a predominant presence in the city of Madurai, in the southern part of Tamil Nadu. Though official figures are hard to come by, it is believed that the Saurashtra population is anywhere between one-fifth and one-fourth of the city's total population.

In the course of migration, Saurashtra people moved in groups and settled in different regions of South India and that caused a slight dialect variation between each group and is noticeable by a Saurashtra speaker when interacting with another group.

See also

• Saurashtra (region)
• Pattusali
• Tippani Dance
• Somnath
• Saraostus

References

1. ↑ Saurashtra at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Saurashtra". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. 
3. ↑ "Census of India 2001: Abstract of speakers' strength of languages and mother tongues". New Delhi, India: The Registrar General & Census Commissioner. Retrieved 2013-12-03. 
4. ↑ Colin Masica, 1993, The Indo-Aryan Languages

Saurashtra language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator