Daman and Diu Language

The main Daman and Diu language is Gujarati. In fact, the socio-cultural life of this union territory of India is very similar to that of the neighboring state of Gujarat. Gujarati is a descendant of Sanskrit.

The family of languages to which the Gujarati language belongs is the Indo-European family. The sub-group to which it belongs is the Indo-Iranian sub-group. It belongs to the Indic branch of language.

The alphabet that is in use for the Gujarati language is quite similar to that of the Hindi and the Sanskrit languages. However, a major difference between these two languages and Gujarati is that it is devoid of the continuous horizontal line that runs along the top. This language of daman and Diu has been declared an official provincial language by the Indian constitution.

The script of this language of Daman and Diu has been derived from the Devanagari script. The oldest document in the Gujarati script belongs to the year 1592. This script was first printed in the year 1797. Till the 19th century, the Devnagari script was used for educational and literary writings while the gujarati script was used only for letter writing and maintaining accounts.

The Gujarati script has other names as well, which are saraphi, that is, banker's script and mahajani, that is, trader's script.

The Gujarati alphabet is a syllabic alphabet in which all the consonants have inherent vowels. the vowels can be expressed as independent letters or diffreent types of diacritical marks. These diacritical marks are used below, above, after or before the consonant that it belongs to.



Last Updated on: 3^rd April 2013