Gujarati

Gujarati is the Western Indo-Aryan language of the Gujarat coast, descended from the Gurjar Apabhramsha and from Old Gujarati, the tongue of the Gujjar clans who ruled much of western India around 1200. The Jain monk Hemachandra codified its parent grammar under the Chaulukya king Jayasimha Siddharaja of Patan, and by 1300 a fairly standard literary form had emerged. Jain Rasa narratives survive from 1185, and the Balavabodha of 1355 is among the earliest Gujarati prose.

Gujarati and Rajasthani were then one speech, sometimes called Old Western Rajasthani, and only separated during the 1400s. Under the Gujarat sultans, who ruled from 1391 to 1583, the Bhakti poet Narsinh Mehta wrote mystical verse in the vernacular.

The Middle Gujarati stage ran to about 1800, and its script is a cursive relation of Devanagari that has dropped the horizontal head line.