"[7] The oldest available inscriptions in Saurashtra are found in Mandasaur, which is a city in the Malwa region (present day Madhya Pradesh).

It was also spoken by the people living along Konkan region, which extends throughout the western coasts of Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka.

[2] Saurashtra is a amalgamation of various present day Indo-Aryan languages like Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati and the older dialects of Rajasthani and Sindhi.

However, the current spoken form of Saurashtra is mixed with the Dravidian languages like Kannada, Telugu and Tamil and it might have originated in 16th or early 17th century.

[2] Speakers of the Saurashtra language, known as Saurashtrians, maintain a predominant presence in Madurai, Thanjavur, Salem, Dindigul, Tiruchirappalli, Tirunelveli, Kanchipuram, Ramanathapuram, Kanyakumari, Chennai, Tiruvannamalai and Vellore Districts of Tamil Nadu.

There were attempts to revitalize the script in the latter half of the 19th century, ignoring most of the complex conjunct characters.

[4] Early Saurashtra texts use a number of complex conjunct forms for writing consonant clusters.

However, when the script was restructured in the 1880s these were abandoned in favour of a virama diacritic, which silences the inherent vowel of the first consonant in a cluster.

[4] The script uses a letter called upakshara, a dependent consonant sign which attaches nasals and liquids to aspirate them.

Some analyses of the script classify aspirated nasal and liquids as a separate set of single discrete letters divided into two parts.

[10] The alphabet chart containing vowels, consonants and the compound letters in Devanagari script are as follows: The language itself is more similar to modern day Gujarati and Marathi as both originated from Prakrit.

It was written by Venkatasoori Swamigal (1800 AD), a Sanskrit scholar and disciple of Venkataramana Bhagavathar who lived in Ayyampettai of Thanjavur district.

Damodaran won the award for his book Jiva Sabda Kosam, a compilation of 1,333 Saurashtra words with English and Tamil meanings.

However, Saroja Sundararajan, was also awarded for Yogendran Monnum Singaru Latun (in Tamil, 'Yogendra Thalaivarkalin Manathiley Ezhuntha Azhagiya Alaigal'), a rendition of works of Adi Sankara's Soundaryalahiri, Kanagadhara stotra and Mahishasuramarthini stotra, Natana Gopala Nayagi Swami's 'Mooschi Deshad,' 'Subramanian Mahatmiyam' and songs of Sai Baba.