Konkani

The Konkani are the Indo-Aryan people of the Konkan, the narrow coastal plain between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, centred on Goa and reaching from north of Bombay to Karwar. They speak Konkani, a southern Indo-Aryan language of the Marathi-Konkani group, attested in stone inscriptions from the second century and first named in the verse of the thirteenth-century saint-poet Namadeva.

In 1337 the coast was held by the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan, first the Bahmanis and later Bijapur, whose governors ruled Goa. In 1510 Afonso de Albuquerque captured Goa for Portugal and made it the capital of the Portuguese Estado da Índia.

Jesuits such as Thomas Stevens studied and printed the language, while missionary preaching and Portuguese rule drew a large share of the people into Catholicism. Other Konkani speakers migrated along the coast to Surat, Mangalore and Cochin, carrying their dialects beyond Goa.