Phase One
Gujarati (Gujarati: (ગુજરાતી Gujarātī) is an Indo-Aryan language, and part of the greater Indo-European language family. It is derived from a language called Old Gujarati(1100 - 1500 AD) which is the ancestor language of the modern Gujarati and Rajasthani languages. It is native to the Indian state of Gujarat, and is its chief language.
There are about 65.5 million speakers of Gujarati worldwide, making it the 26th most spoken native language in the world. Gujarati is one of the twenty-two official languages and fourteen regional languages of India. It is officially recognized in the state of Gujarat, India.
The Gujarati Script
Gujarati (Gujarati: (ગુજરાતી Gujarātī) is an Indo-Aryan language, and part of the greater Indo-European language family. It is derived from a language called Old Gujarati(1100 - 1500 AD) which is the ancestor language of the modern Gujarati and Rajasthani languages. It is native to the Indian state of Gujarat, and is its chief language.
There are about 65.5 million speakers of Gujarati worldwide, making it the 26th most spoken native language in the world. Gujarati is one of the twenty-two official languages and fourteen regional languages of India. It is officially recognized in the state of Gujarat, India.
The Gujarati Script
The Gujarati script (ગુજરાતી લિપિ Gujǎrātī Lipi), which like all Nāgarī writing systems is strictly speaking an abugidarather than an alphabet, is used to write the Gujarati andKutchi languages. It is a variant of Devanāgarī script differentiated by the loss of the characteristic horizontal line running above the letters and by a small number of modifications in the remaining characters.
With a few additional characters, added for this purpose, the Gujarati script is also often used to write Sanskrit and Hindi.
Gujarati numerical digits are also different from their Devanagari counterparts.
Origin
Gujarati script is descended from Brahmi and is part of the Brahmic family.The Gujarātī script was adapted from the Devanāgarī script to write the Gujarātī language. The earliest known document in the Gujarātī script is a handwritten manuscript dating from 1592, and the script first appeared in print in a 1797 advertisement. Until the 19th century it was used mainly for writing letters and keeping accounts, while the Devanāgarī script was used for literature and academic writings. It is also known as the śarāphī (banker's), vāṇiāśāī (merchant's) ormahājanī (trader's) script.
Unicode
Gujarati script was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0. Unicode block for Gujarati is U+0A80–U+0AFF. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.
