Язык саураштра: история и особенности

Indo Aryan language spoken in India

Saurashtra (Saurashtra script: , Tamil script: சௌராட்டிர மொழி, Devanagari script: सौराष्ट्र भाषा) is an Indo Aryan language spoken primarily by the Saurashtrians of Southern India who migrated from the Lata region of present day Gujarat to south of Vindhyas in the Middle Ages. Saurashtra, an offshoot of Sauraseni Prakrit, once spoken in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, is now chiefly spoken in various places of Tamil Nadu and are mostly concentrated in Madurai, Thanjavur and Salem Districts. Census of India places the language under Gujarati. Official figures show the number of speakers as 247,702 (2011 census).

Saurashtra belongs to the western branch of the Indo Aryan languages, a dominant language family of the Indian subcontinent. It is part of the greater Indo European language family. It is also classified as being part of a Gujaratic languages that, alongside Saurashtra includes the languages like Gujarati (see SIL Ethnologue).

According to the oral legends of the Saurashtra people, they migrated to South India from the Saurashtra region of modern day Gujarat; however, scholars believe this account lacks historical basis, and that the Saurashtrans actually migrated from the area of Mandsaur. The name "Saurashtra" itself is from Sanskrit सौराष्ट्र (saurāṣṭra, ), the vṛddhi form of सुराष्ट्र (surāṣṭra, ), derived from सु (su, ) + राष्ट्र (rāṣṭra, ). Thus the name literally means "(of/from) a good country."

Saurashtra for most of the part had been an oral language lacking any script of its own. Around the 17th to 18th centuries some attempted to write it in Telugu script. Around 19th century a script was invented. There were attempts to revitalize the script in the latter half of the 19th century, ignoring most of the complex conjunct characters. The Saurashtra script is an abugida, that is, each letter represents a consonant+vowel syllable. There are thirty four such letters. An unmarked letter represents a syllable with the inherent vowel [a]; letters can be marked with one of eleven vowel diacritics to represent a syllable with a different vowel. Vowel diacritics are attached to the top right corner of a base letter or written alongside it. There are also twelve letters for writing independent vowels (i. e. word initial vowels). The four vocalic liquid letters r, ru, l and lu behave in the same way as vowels, so are often included in the vowel class. The alphabet chart containing vowels, consonants and the compound letters in Devanagari script are as follows: