Marathi

Where it’s spoken

Marathi is the official language of Maharashtra, India’s second-most-populous state, and is also co-official in Goa and Daman and Diu. Roughly 83 million people speak it as a first language, with substantial diaspora populations in the Gulf states, the United States, and the UK.

What it sounds like

Marathi has a typical Indo-Aryan consonant system including aspirated stops, dental and retroflex contrasts, and the retroflex lateral ḷ. It is notable for preserving the inherent schwa more consistently than Hindi, and for having grammatical gender across three classes — masculine, feminine, and neuter — which most other modern Indo-Aryan languages have lost or simplified.

How it’s written

Marathi uses Devanagari with a few orthographic conventions that differ from Hindi — for instance, the use of ळ (ḷa). Historically, the Modi script — a flowing cursive — was used for handwritten Marathi until the 20th century; it has experienced a small revival.

History

Marathi literature began in the late 12th century with religious texts of the Yadava court. The Bhakti movement produced a vast body of devotional poetry, and the 17th-century Maratha Empire under Shivaji established Marathi as a court language.