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Gujarati is the official language of
Gujarat state.
It is an
Indo-European
language, of the
Indo-Aryan
family, spoken by about 46 million people worldwide, making it the 23rd most
spoken language in the world. Of these, roughly 45.5 million reside in India,
150,000 in Uganda, 250,000 in Tanzania, 50,000 in Kenya and roughly 100,000 in
Pakistan.
It is written in
Gujarati script,
an
abugida
very similar to
Devanagari
(the script used for
Sanskrit
and
Hindi),
but unlike Devnagari, it is written without the line overhead.
The Gujarati spoken today takes considerable vocabulary from
Persian
due to the more than five centuries of the rule of
Sultan
kings who were Persian-speaking
Muslim.
Gujarati is one of the official
regional languages
of India. Gujarati was the mother-tongue of both
Mohandas K. Gandhi,
the "father of India" and Quaid-e Azam
Mohammed Ali Jinnah,
the "father of Pakistan".
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