In North America, Gujarati is one of the fastest-growing and most widely spoken Indian languages in the United States and Canada.

[2][24][25] Elsewhere, Gujarati is spoken to a lesser extent in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and Middle Eastern countries such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

[2][26][27] Gujarati (sometimes spelled Gujerati, Gujarathi, Guzratee, Guujaratee, Gujrathi, and Gujerathi)[2][28] is a modern Indo-Aryan (IA) language evolved from Sanskrit.

Texts of this era display characteristic Gujarati features such as direct/oblique noun forms, postpositions, and auxiliary verbs.

[45] A formal grammar, Prakrita Vyakarana, of the precursor to this language, Gurjar Apabhraṃśa, was written by Jain monk and eminent scholar Acharya Hemachandra Suri in the reign of Chaulukya king Jayasimha Siddharaja of Anhilwara (Patan).

[46] MIddle Gujarati (AD 1500–1800) split off from Rajasthani, and developed the phonemes ɛ and ɔ, the auxiliary stem ch-, and the possessive marker -n-.

[47] Major phonological changes characteristic of the transition between Old and Middle Gujarati are:[48] These developments would have grammatical consequences.

[49] In literature, the third quarter of the 19th century saw a series of milestones for Gujarati, which previously had verse as its dominant mode of literary composition.

He helped to inspire a renewal in its literature,[55] and in 1936 he introduced the current spelling convention at the Gujarati Literary Society's 12th meeting.

According to the 2016 census, Gujarati is the fourth most-spoken South Asian language in Toronto after Hindustani, Punjabi and Tamil.

A portion of these numbers consists of East African Gujaratis who, under increasing discrimination and policies of Africanisation in their newly independent resident countries (especially Uganda, where Idi Amin expelled 50,000 Asians), were left with uncertain futures and citizenships.

[60] Besides being spoken by the Gujarati people, many non-Gujarati residents of Gujarat also speak it, among them the Kutchis (as a literary language),[55] the Parsis (adopted as a mother tongue), and Hindu Sindhi refugees from Pakistan.

It is officially recognised in the state of Gujarat and the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.

Gujarati is recognised and taught as a minority language in the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu and the union territory of Delhi.

It is a variant of the Devanāgarī script, differentiated by the loss of the characteristic horizontal line running above the letters and by a small number of modifications in the remaining characters.

While Sanskrit eventually stopped being spoken vernacularly, in that it changed into Middle Indo-Aryan, it was nonetheless standardised and retained as a literary and liturgical language for long after.

Both English and Perso-Arabic influences are quite nationwide phenomena, in a way paralleling tatsam as a common vocabulary set or bank.

As a consequence Indian languages were changed greatly, with the large scale entry of Persian and its many Arabic loans into the Gujarati lexicon.

dāvo – claim, fāydo – benefit, natījo – result, and hamlo – attack, all carry Gujarati's masculine gender marker, o. khānũ – compartment, has the neuter ũ.

Aside from easy slotting with the auxiliary karvũ, a few words have made a complete transition of verbification: kabūlvũ – to admit (fault), kharīdvũ – to buy, kharǎcvũ – to spend (money), gujarvũ – to pass.

Loanwords include new innovations and concepts, first introduced directly through British colonial rule, and then streaming in on the basis of continued Anglophone dominance in the Republic of India.

The major driving force behind this latter category has to be the continuing role of English in modern India as a language of education, prestige, and mobility.

Though often inexplicable, gender assignment may follow the same basis as it is expressed in Gujarati: vowel type, and the nature of word meaning.

[100] The source dialect of these loans imparts an earlier pronunciation of ch as an affricate instead of the current standard of [ʃ].

tadaga-m "pond, lake pool," and reinforced in later sense of "large artificial container for liquid" (1690) by Port.