Saurashtri
| Saurashtri | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
India ( Tamil Nadu ) | |
| speaker | 250,000 (2011) | |
| Linguistic classification |
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| Official status | ||
| Official language in | - | |
Saurashtri (also Saurashtra , Sourashtra ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu . It is closely related to the Gujarati spoken in northwest India . In the 2011 Indian census, around 250,000 people gave Saurashtri as their mother tongue, with the Saurashtri speakers being subsumed under the number for Gujarati.
Saurashtri belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family and thus forms a language island in the otherwise Dravidian South India. The speakers of the Saurashtri are members of the Patnulkarar weavers' caste , who originally emigrated from the north-west Indian Gujarat to southern India. The name of the language is derived from the Saurashtra region in Gujarat. Today the Saurashtri speakers are scattered across different cities in Tamil Nadu. The largest Saurashtri-speaking communities are in Madurai (94,000 people), Salem (21,000 people) and Paramakudi (16,000 people, each according to the 2011 census). The members of the Saurashtri- speaking minority are bilingual : they use Saurashtri at home and the majority language Tamil in public .
Sometimes a separate script, the Saurashtri script , and sometimes a modified version of the Tamil script is used to write the Saurashtri .
literature
- Norihiko Učida: A Saurashtra-English dictionary . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1990.
Web links
- Saurashtra . Ethnologue, 2005