Gujarati

Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Indian state of Gujarat. It is part of the greater Indo-European language family. Gujarati is descended from Old Gujarati (circa 1100 – 1500 AD). In India, it is the chief language in the state of Gujarat, as well as an official language in the union territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Gujarati is the language of the Gujjars, who had ruled Rajputana and Punjab.

 

According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 4.5% of the Indian population (1.21 billion according to the 2011 census) speaks Gujarati, which amounts to 54.6 million speakers in India.There are about 65.5 million speakers of Gujarati world wide, making it the 26th most spoken native language in the world. Along with Romani and Sindhi, it is among the most western of Indo-Aryan languages. Gujarati was the first language of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

 

Of the approximately 46 million speakers of Gujarati in 1997, roughly 45.5 million resided in India, 150,000 in Uganda, 50,000 in Tanzania, 50,000 in Kenya and roughly 100,000 in Karachi, Pakistan, excluding several hundreds of thousands of Memonis who do not self-identify as Gujarati, but hail from a region within the state of Gujarat.There is a certain amount of Mauritian population and a large amount ofRéunion Island people who are from Gujarati descent among which some of them still speak Gujarati.

 

A considerable Gujarati-speaking population exists in North America, most particularly in the New York City Metropolitan Area and in the Greater Toronto Area, which have over 100,000 speakers and over 75,000 speakers, respectively, but also throughout the major metropolitan areas of the United States and Canada.

 

According to the 2011 census, Gujarati  is the17th  most spoken language in the Greater Toronto Area, and the fourth most spoken South Asian language after  Urdu, Punjabi and Tamil. The UK has 200,000 speakers, many of them situated in the London area, but also in Birmingham,  Manchester, and in Leicester,Coventry, Bradford and the former mill towns within Lancashire and Wembley.A portion of these numbers consists of East African Gujaratis who, under increasing discrimination  and policies of Africanisation in their newly independent resident countries (especially Uganda, where Idi Amin expelled 50,000 Asians), were left with uncertain futures and citizenships. Most, with Britishpassports, settled in the UK.Gujarati is offered as a GCSE  subject for students in the UK.

 

Besides being spoken by the Gujarati people, non-Gujarati residents of and migrants to the state of Gujarat also count as speakers, among them the Kutchi,the Parsis (adopted as a mother tongue), and Hindu Sindhirefugees from Pakistan.