Marathi

Marathi is the Indo-Aryan language of Maharashtra on the Deccan, descended through an Apabhraṃśa stage from the Maharashtri Prakrit of ancient India. Its earliest records include a copper plate of 739 at Satara. After 1187 the Yadavas of Devagiri switched their inscriptions from Kannada and Sanskrit to Marathi, and by the fourteenth century it was the region's dominant written language.

Literature blossomed with the Varkari saints: Dnyaneshwar, who died in 1296, made it a philosophical vehicle in his Dnyaneshwari commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, a tradition continued by Eknath in the sixteenth century and Tukaram, who left more than three thousand devotional abhangs in the seventeenth.

From the thirteenth century Marathi was written in Modi for administration and Devanagari for literature. Missionary presses at Serampore issued a Marathi New Testament in 1811 and the first major Marathi-English dictionary in 1831.