Marwari

Marwari is grouped under Indo-Aryan language family, belonging to the Western Zone and historically grouped under the Rajasthani macro-language.

Speakers

According to the 2011 Census of India, Marwari is registered as a mother tongue with approximately 7.8 million (7,831,288) speakers.

Distribution in India

Marwari is primarily spoken in the western state of Rajasthan, particularly in the historic Marwar region which includes the districts of Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Barmer, Bikaner, Nagaur, Jalor, and Pali. Significant speaker populations are also located in neighboring districts of Gujarat and Haryana, alongside diaspora merchant communities scattered across major urban centers in India.

Major grammatical features

• Phonology: Features a typical Indo-Aryan contrast between aspirated and unaspirated stops, along with a distinct set of retroflex consonants, including the retroflex lateral flap ([ɭ]) and retroflex nasal ([ɳ]). Some dialects exhibit characteristic vowel-lowering and h-deletion or replacement with glottal fricatives.
• Morphology: Marwari is a split-ergative language where the ergative postposition (often ne) marks the subject of transitive verbs in perfective tenses. Nouns are inflected for two genders (masculine and feminine), two numbers (singular and plural), and three cases (direct, oblique, and vocative). Case relationships are largely mediated through postpositions (e.g., the genitive markers ro, ri, ra).
• Syntax: The basic word order is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). Adjectives generally precede the nouns they modify and agree with them in gender, number, and case. Auxiliaries follow the main verb to denote tense, aspect, and mood.

Further reading

For more information, see the Marwari language Wikipedia article.