Gujarati

Gujarati is the main and official language of the state of Gujarat in western India. It is an Indo-Aryan language closely related to Hindi, written in the Gujarati script, which is an Indic-based abugida-style script that originated as a modified Nagari script.

Unlike Hindi, Gujarati no longer has a vowel length contrast for /i/ and /u/, though they are still distinguished in writing by most writers.

The vowel ऋ <r̥> in Sanskrit originally represented a syllabic liquid like /ɹ̩/, in modern Bengali this is pronounced as a sequence /ɾu/ in words directly derived from Sanskrit, which is not a different vowel from /u/, but the original Sanskrit vowel letter is still indicated in the spelling.

Consonants

The first 25 letters in a typical Indic-template script consist of five series of five letters each. The five letters in a series represent voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, plain voiced, breathy voiced, and nasal consonants, in that order. The five series are velar (k row), palatal (c row), retroflex (ṭ row), dental (t row), and labial (p row).

The remaining consonant letters in the main Indic-template block consist of two series, one series of sonorants (y, r, l, v) and one series of fricatives (ś, ṣ, s, h). /ŋ/ and /ɲ/ are not contrastive in Gujarati; they only occur before the consonants in their respective series.

The dental series consonants are apical dental consonants where the tip of the tongue must touch the back of the front teeth, so alveolar coronal consonants like /t/ and /d/ in English loanwords are perceived as the retroflex series consonants instead and spelled as such. The dental component is not necessary in the case of /n/ because the retroflex /ɳ/ is generally realized as [ɽ̃] except when coming before another retroflex consonant.

The /pʰ/ sound for many speakers is realized as [f].

/ɾ/ can also be realized as a short trill, and when geminate, it is typically realized as a trill [rː].

There is typically no distinction between the palatal and retroflex sibilants /ʃ/ and /ʂ/, with both being pronounced as /ʃ/. Some speakers also do not distinguish this /ʃ/ from /s/.

Other Vowels and Vowel-like Marks

ं (anusvar) before a consonant indicates a homorganic nasal consonant from that same series. It can also be used to indicate nasalization of a vowel, especially in word-final position.

ः (visarga) indicates a soft h pronunciation after the vowel, optionally followed by a short echo of the vowel sound again. For the most part this is used only in words derived directly from Sanskrit, with a couple exceptions. It is romanized as <ḥ>.

There are two vowel letters that can be used for /æ/ and /ɑ/ ~ /ɔ/ in English loanwords:

There are also some other Sanskrit syllabic liquid vowel letters that are extremely rare, even in Sanskrit:

These letters will practically never be encountered in written Gujarati unless one is reading specifically about Sanskrit.