Marathi Language Guide

Official language in
India
Script
Devanagari

Where it's spoken

Marathi is described as one of India's official languages and as the language of the state of Maharashtra. This state-level status follows from a mechanism set out in India's constitution: rather than naming one official language for the country as a whole, the constitution lets the legislature of a state adopt by law any language in use in that state as the state's own official language.

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Script & pronunciation

This app's Marathi cards are written in the Devanagari script, which the Unicode Standard describes as used for classical Sanskrit and modern Hindi, with extensions used to write other related languages of India such as Marathi. Devanagari, like other Indic scripts descended from it, is an abugida — partway between a syllabary and an alphabet — in which each consonant letter carries an inherent vowel, generally the short a, that can be changed by an attached vowel sign or cancelled outright by the virama sign. Some vowel signs are written before the consonant they belong to even though they are pronounced after it: the Unicode code chart notes that the vowel sign ि, DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN I, stands to the left of the consonant it modifies. This app's card एक मिनिट ("Just a moment") shows the same pattern in its romanization ek miniṭ: मिनिट is built from म + ि + न + ि + ट, and both ि signs come before the consonant (म, न) they follow in pronunciation. Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters follows an international standard that marks distinctions like long vowels and retroflex consonants with diacritics rather than plain Latin letters. This app's romanization does the same, as in नाही (nāhī, "No"), where ā and ī carry a macron for a long vowel, and ठीक आहे (ṭhīk āhe, "It's OK / I'm fine"), where ṭ carries a dot for a retroflex consonant.

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Grammar essentials

Marathi's basic word order is subject–object–verb (SOV), a feature it shares with other Indo-Aryan languages. Negation follows the verb rather than preceding it: WALS classifies Marathi as one of the languages in which there is a negative word that follows the verb, not necessarily immediately after it. This app's card मला मराठी येत नाही ("I can't speak Marathi") shows this order: नाही (nāhī) comes directly after the verb येत (yet), and the card's own note explains the sentence as a dative construction, literally "it doesn't come to me," parallel to the same construction in Hindi. Marathi verbs can also agree with the gender of the subject: this app's card मी थोडं थोडं बोलतो ("I speak a little") notes that a female speaker would instead say बोलते (bolte), with the verb changing to agree with the speaker's gender.

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Politeness & etiquette

Politeness in Marathi appears through the choice of second-person pronoun, which WALS describes as having multiple distinctions: तू (tū) is used to address family members, intimate persons, or people of lower status; तुम्ही (tumhī) is used to address strangers, especially when someone's status is uncertain; and आपण (āpaṇ) is an extra-polite form used for priests, teachers, in-laws, and formal occasions. This app's card तुम्हाला इंग्रजी येते का? ("Do you speak English?") notes to use तुम्ही with strangers and reserve तू for close friends and family, and its own card for तुम्ही itself warns that the familiar तू can be rude with strangers and elders.

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