Translation Resources

Marathi is one of the widely spoken languages of India and has a long literary history that can be traced back to the 8th century

Facts

• About 90 million people speak Marathi. Of these, 70 million are native speakers and 20 million are second language speakers.
• There are speakers of Marathi in Israel and Mauritius.
• Marathi is one of the 22 official languages recognized by the Constitution of India.

	Some facts on Marathi Primarily spoken in: Maharashtra, India Also spoken in: Goa, Gujrat, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and other pockets of the world. Official language of: Maharashtra Total number of speakers: 70 million native speakers, 20 million second language speakers Rank: 13–17 (native); in league with Korean, Vietnamese, Telugu, and Tamil

Brief History

Marathiis part of the Indo-Aryan grouping of the Indo-European family of languages. All Indo-Aryan languages originated from Sanskrit. Three Prakrit languages, namely, Saurseni, Magadhi, and Maharashtri emerged from Sanskrit. Marathi descends from Maharashtri, which was spoken in the region of Maharashtra. In the first few centuries, Maharashtri was the official language of the Satavahana empire. Maharashtri slowly evolved into Marathi during the 15th and 16th centuries and became prominant during the reign of Chhatrapati Shivaji (1630–1680).

Vocabulary

The region of Maharashtra was under the influence of Muslim and Maratha rulers who used Urdu, Persian, and Arabic words. Hence, Marathi uses a number of modified words from these languages. For example, Khurchii (chair) originally comes from the Arabic word Kursi (chair).

Writing system

Similar to Hindi, Marathi uses the Devanagari script for writing. Before the use of the printing press, writers in Marathi used a different script called the Modi script. This looked like today's Dravidian scripts and offered the advantage of greater writing speed because of cursive letters. However, with the advent of large-scale printing, the use of the Modi script was discontinued as it proved very difficult for type-setting.

Fonts

http://www.maharashtra.gov.in/download/downloadBottom.php

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