Marathi language

Marathi is a beautiful language spoken mainly by the Marathi people in the state of Maharashtra. It is also spoken in nearby areas like Goa, parts of Gujarat, Karnataka, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. In Maharashtra, Marathi is the official language, and it is one of the official languages in Goa as well.

Marathi is one of the 22 important languages of India, with around 83 million people speaking it. It is the third most spoken language in India, after Hindustani and Bengali. Marathi has a very old and rich history of literature, with some of the oldest writings among modern Indian languages.

In 2024, the Government of India gave Marathi the special title of a classical language. This shows how important and valuable the Marathi language is. Marathi has special ways of speaking, like different forms of the word "we," and it has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The sounds in Marathi also include some unique types that make the language interesting to learn.

History

See also: Marathi literature

Modern Indo-Aryan languages, including Marathi, come from old languages called Prakrits. Marathi is one of several languages that come from a Prakrit called Maharashtri. Over time, these languages changed and developed.

Marathi was first seen in old writings from the year 739. Later, in the 1100s, more writings in Marathi appeared, often mixed with Sanskrit or Kannada. The oldest writings only in Marathi came from around the year 1012. These early writings show that Marathi was used as a written language by the 1200s.

During the time of the Yadava kings, Marathi became more common in official writings. Religious groups also helped grow the use of Marathi. By the 1300s, Marathi was used in courts and for creating books on many subjects.

In the 1300s, a saint named Dnyaneshwar wrote an important book in Marathi. Other poets and writers also used the language. During the time of Muslim rulers, Marathi was still used by local leaders and people. The rulers even used Marathi for official work.

When the Maratha Empire began, Marathi became very important. The leader Shivaji used Marathi instead of Persian in his court. This helped Marathi grow as a language for official use. Later leaders also helped spread Marathi.

In the 1800s, British rulers helped organize Marathi writing. They made dictionaries and printed books in Marathi. The first Marathi newspaper started in 1832. Marathi theater and music also grew popular.

After India gained independence in 1947, Marathi was recognized as an important language. New books and plays in Marathi became very popular. Writers from many backgrounds helped grow Marathi literature.

Recently, some parents in cities are choosing to send their children to schools where they learn in English. This has caused some worry that Marathi might not be used as much in the future.

Geographic distribution

Marathi is mainly spoken in Maharashtra and in parts of nearby states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. There are also Marathi speakers in the union-territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli. Many people from Maharashtra have moved to other places in India and around the world, and they continue to speak Marathi.

According to the 2011 census, there were about 83 million native Marathi speakers in India, making it the third most spoken native language in the country after Hindi and Bengali.

International

The following table shows where Marathi speakers live according to the 2019 edition of Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International in the United States.

Status

Marathi is the official language of Maharashtra and an additional official language in the state of Goa. In Goa, Konkani is the main official language, but Marathi can also be used for official work if needed. Marathi is one of the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which means it is a recognized "scheduled language".

The Government of Maharashtra has successfully applied for Marathi to be called a "classical language", and this was approved by the Government of India on 3 October 2024. Special rules for writing Marathi, supported by the Government of Maharashtra, give important words from Sanskrit a special place in the language. Many universities in different parts of India, such as Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Vadodara and Goa University in Goa, have departments for studying Marathi. Marathi Day is celebrated every year on 27 February, the birthday of the poet Kusumagraj.

Dialects

See also: Marathi-Konkani languages

Standard Marathi is based on the ways of speaking used by teachers and newspapers.

Experts who study languages recognize 42 different ways of speaking Marathi. These ways of speaking share many features with nearby languages, making them different from standard Marathi. Most of the differences are in words and sounds. Even though there are many ways of speaking, people can usually understand each other well.

Varhadi

Main article: Varhadi dialect

Varhadi (Varhādi) is used in the western part of Vidarbha in Maharashtra. In Marathi, a special sound is common, but in Varhadi, it sometimes changes to a different sound, making this way of speaking unique. These sound changes happen often in spoken Marathi, so the ways of speaking differ from place to place in Maharashtra.

Zadi Boli

Zaadi Boli is spoken in a forested area in far eastern Maharashtra, including places like Gondia, Bhandara, Chandrapur, Gadchiroli, and parts of Nagpur. Groups and writers are working to protect this special way of speaking Marathi.

Southern Indian Marathi

Thanjavur Marathi, Namadeva Shimpi Marathi, Arey Marathi, Kasaragod, and Bhavsar Marathi are spoken by people whose families came from Maharashtra to Southern India. These ways of speaking keep the basic form of Marathi from the 1600s and have been influenced by other languages in the area. People who speak these ways live in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka.

Other

• Thanjavur Marathi, spoken in Tanjore, Tamil Nadu
• Judæo-Marathi, spoken by the Bene Israel community
• East Indian Marathi, spoken by the East Indian group

Other languages and ways of speaking in Maharashtra include Maharashtrian Konkani, Malvani, Sangameshwari, Agri, Andh, Warli, Vadvali, and Samavedi.

Phonology

Main article: Marathi phonology

Marathi has its own special sounds and ways of speaking that make it unique. These sounds help the language to be clear and easy to understand for its speakers. The study of these sounds is important for learning how the language works.

Writing systems

Main articles: Devanagari, Balbodh, and Modi script

The Marathi language has been written using different scripts throughout history. The Kadamba script and its versions were once used for writing Marathi on stones and copper plates. Today, Marathi is mainly written in the Balbodh version of the Devanagari script, which is a special way of using Devanagari that is a bit different from how it is used in Hindi. This version keeps some sounds that other languages using Devanagari have dropped.

From the 1300s until the 1800s, Marathi was also written in the Modi script for official work, but Devanagari was used for books and literature. Since 1950, the Balbodh style of Devanagari has been the main way to write Marathi. Father Thomas Stephens tried to write Marathi in the Latin script in the 1600s, but Devanagari became the standard because it was better suited for the language.

Marathi uses an alphabet with special letters for sounds not found in other languages that use Devanagari. It is written from left to right and includes extra vowels and consonants. The script also has special ways to write combinations of letters, called consonant clusters, which make reading and writing Marathi unique.

In 2008, the first Braille newspaper in India, the Marathi Sparshdnyan, was published to make news available to everyone, including those who cannot see.

Grammar

Main article: Marathi grammar

Marathi grammar is similar to other modern Indo-Aryan languages. It uses a mix of different ways to build words and sentences. One special thing about Marathi is that it has three genders for words: masculine, feminine, and neuter. The usual order in a sentence is subject, then object, and finally the verb. Marathi also has some unique features, like special ways to talk about "we" that include or exclude the person being spoken to, which is more common in some other language families.

Sharing of linguistic resources with other languages

Marathi has been shaped by many other languages over time. It was mainly influenced by Prakrit, Maharashtri, and Apabhraṃśa. Formal Marathi also borrows many words and ideas from Sanskrit.

Marathi has also shared words and ways of speaking with languages like the Indian Dravidian languages. It has met and mixed with foreign languages such as Persian, Arabic, English, and European languages like French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Marathi includes many words from Sanskrit. Some examples are nantar (after), pūrṇa (complete), and karaṇ (cause). It also has words from Arabic, Persian, and other Dravidian languages.

Marathi often joins words together to make new ones, like combining ati and uttam to get atyuttam. The language also has special names for numbers and parts of numbers.

Marathi on computers and the Internet

Earlier, Marathi did not have much support from computer systems and Internet services, like some other Indian languages. However, things have improved recently. New projects and technologies have helped create software and Internet applications for Marathi. Today, you can type in Marathi and find display options on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Many Marathi websites, including news sites, have become popular, especially among people from Maharashtra living outside India. Online efforts like the Marathi language Wikipedia have also grown very popular.

Natural language processing for Marathi

People have been working on tools to help computers understand and use the Marathi language better. There are special collections of words and sentences in Marathi that scientists use for their studies. One important collection, called L3CubeMahaSent, has about 16,000 tweets that are sorted into three groups: positive, negative, and neutral feelings.

Another collection, L3Cube-MahaNER, helps computers learn to find important names and places in sentences. There are also datasets designed to help computers spot mean or hurtful words in Marathi. These tools are used in competitions where experts try different ways to teach computers to understand language better. Some of the best methods use special kinds of computer programs that have already learned a lot about many languages.

Corpus development

Corpus linguistics helps us understand how language changes and is used over time. The Linguistic Survey of India by George Abraham Grierson made one of the first organized attempts to document the Marathi language.

People have tried to create collections, called corpora, of Marathi texts. Early work included the Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English, developed at a university in Maharastra, though it focused on Indian English. Projects like the IIT Bombay WordNet also include Marathi, but they don’t give word counts for detailed analysis. Other studies, such as one at the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore, use sampled pages from books to build text collections in Marathi.

Researchers at the University of Mumbai have created the first Marathi WordCorp, a collection of word counts, using over 700 literary works. Tools like Google Books Ngram Viewer show how word frequencies change over time, but there is no such database for Indian languages yet. The Indian Languages Word Corpus WebApp, also developed by researchers at the University of Mumbai, tracks word usage by decade from before 1920 to 2020, though it provides raw data that needs further processing.

Studies have also looked at statistical models for Marathi corpora. For example, Zipf’s law, which describes patterns in word use, works well for Marathi, showing that the corpus has enough words and texts. Heaps’ law also applies, indicating that Marathi has more unique words than expected, possibly due to its writing system and grammar.

Marathi Language Day

Marathi Language Day is celebrated on February 27 every year in the state of Maharashtra. This special day is managed by the Ministry of Marathi Language and marks the birthday of the famous Marathi poet V.V. Shirwadkar, also known as Kusumagraj.

Schools and colleges hold essay competitions and seminars, and government officials organize many events to honor the Marathi language.