Marathi (/məˈrɑːti/;[13] मराठी, Marāṭhī, pronounced [məˈɾaːʈʰiː] ⓘ) is a classical Indo-Aryan language predominantly spoken by Marathi people in the Indian state of Maharashtra and is also spoken in other states like in Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and the territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu and also in parts Pakistani province of Sindh.

[23][26] Further growth and usage of the language was because of two religious sects – the Mahanubhava and Varkari panthans – who adopted Marathi as the medium for preaching their doctrines of devotion.

The 13th century Varkari saint Dnyaneshwar (1275–1296) wrote a treatise in Marathi on Bhagawat Gita popularly called Dnyaneshwari and Amrutanubhava.

The 16th century saint-poet Eknath (1528–1599) is well known for composing the Eknāthī Bhāgavat, a commentary on Bhagavat Purana and the devotional songs called Bharud.

[33] The Persian influence continues to this day with many Persian derived words used in everyday speech such as bāg (Garden), kārkhānā (factory), shahar (city), bāzār (market), dukān (shop), hushār (clever), kāḡaḏ (paper), khurchi (chair), jamin (land), jāhirāt (advertisement), and hazār (thousand)[34][35] Marathi also became language of administration during the Ahmadnagar Sultanate.

[39] Shivaji Maharaj commissioned one of his officials, Balaji Avaji Chitnis, to make a comprehensive lexicon to replace Persian and Arabic terms with their Sanskrit equivalents.

This period also saw the development of Powada (ballads sung in honour of warriors), and Lavani (romantic songs presented with dance and instruments like tabla).

Major poet composers of Powada and Lavani songs of the 17th and the 18th century were Anant Phandi, Ram Joshi and Honaji Bala.

[42] The British colonial period starting in early 1800s saw standardisation of Marathi grammar through the efforts of the Christian missionary William Carey.

The late-19th century in Maharashtra saw the rise of essayist Vishnushastri Chiplunkar with his periodical, Nibandhmala that had essays that criticised social reformers like Phule and Gopal Hari Deshmukh.

Notable grammarians of this period were Tarkhadkar, A.K.Kher, Moro Keshav Damle, and R.Joshi[57] The first half of the 20th century was marked by new enthusiasm in literary pursuits, and socio-political activism helped achieve major milestones in Marathi literature, drama, music and film.

[64] Notable Dalit authors writing in Marathi include Arun Kamble, Shantabai Kamble, Raja Dhale, Namdev Dhasal, Daya Pawar, Annabhau Sathe, Laxman Mane, Laxman Gaikwad, Sharankumar Limbale, Bhau Panchbhai, Kishor Shantabai Kale, Narendra Jadhav, Keshav Meshram, Urmila Pawar, Vinay Dharwadkar, Gangadhar Pantawane, Kumud Pawde and Jyoti Lanjewar.

[65][66][67][68] In recent decades there has been a trend among Marathi speaking parents of all social classes in major urban areas of sending their children to English medium schools.

[69] Marathi is primarily spoken in Maharashtra[70] and parts of neighbouring states of Gujarat (majorly in Vadodara, and among a small number of population in Surat), Madhya Pradesh (in the districts of Burhanpur, Betul, Chhindwara and Balaghat), Goa, Chhattisgarh, Tamil Nadu (in Thanjavur) and Karnataka (in the districts of Belagavi, Karwar, Bagalkote, Vijayapura, Kalaburagi and Bidar), Telangana, union-territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli.

Native speakers of Marathi formed 70.34% of the population in Maharashtra, 10.89% in Goa, 7.01% in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, 4.53% in Daman and Diu, 3.38% in Karnataka, 1.7% in Madhya Pradesh, and 1.52% in Gujarat.

[16] The following table is a list of the geographic distribution of Marathi speakers as it appears in the 2019 edition of Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International, which is based in the United States.

[citation needed] Traditions of Marathi Linguistics and the above-mentioned rules give special status to tatsamas, words adapted from Sanskrit.

[3] Other Marathi–Konkani languages and dialects spoken in Maharashtra include Maharashtrian Konkani, Malvani, Sangameshwari, Agri, Andh, Warli, Vadvali and Samavedi.

[89] Marathi retains several features of Sanskrit that have been lost in other Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi and Bengali, especially in terms of pronunciation of vowels and consonants.

Spoken Marathi allows for conservative stress patterns in words like शब्द (śabda) with an emphasis on the ending vowel sound, a feature that has been lost in Hindi due to Schwa deletion.

[citation needed] The Kadamba script and its variants have been historically used to write Marathi in the form of inscriptions on stones and copper plates.

William Carey in 1807 Observed that as with other parts of India, a traditional duality existed in script usage between Devanagari for religious texts, and Modi for commerce and administration.

Combination of the vowels with K: From the thirteenth century until 1950, Marathi, especially for business use, was written in the Modi alphabet, a cursive script designed for minimising the lifting of pen from paper while writing.

[103] Source:[104] In February 2008, Swagat Thorat published India's first Braille newspaper, the Marathi Sparshdnyan, a news, politics and current affairs fort nightly magazine.

[citation needed] Such words are for example nantar (from nantara or after), pūrṇa (pūrṇa or complete, full, or full measure of something), ola (ola or damp), kāraṇ (kāraṇa or cause), puṣkaḷ (puṣkala or much, many), satat (satata or always), vichitra (vichitra or strange), svatah (svatah or himself/herself), prayatna (prayatna or effort, attempt), bhītī (from bhīti, or fear) and bhāṇḍe (bhāṇḍa or vessel for cooking or storing food).

For example, ati + uttam gives the word atyuttam, Ganesh + Utsav = Ganeshotsav, miith-bhaakar ("salt-bread"), udyog-patii ("businessman"), ashṭa-bhujaa ("eight-hands", name of a Hindu goddess).

Earlier Marathi suffered from weak support by computer operating systems and Internet services, as have other Indian languages.

[122] The HASOC2021 dataset was proposed for conducting a machine learning competition on hate, offensive, and profane content identification in Marathi collocated with Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE 2021).

The Google Books Ngram Viewer (Michel et al., 2011)[130] is a relatively new and advanced method that shows how the frequency of n-grams has changed over a specific period.

The limitation with the method is that it only gives researchers the raw OCR data to "combine and collapse frequencies of correctly and incorrectly recognised words" (p. 2).