Gujarati

Gujarati (ગુજરાતી Gujarātī) is an Indo-Aryan language with ~57M speakers, official in the Indian state of Gujarat plus the Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli union territories. The Gujarati diaspora is distinctive in scale and economic prominence: ~5M+ in East Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania — many displaced by Idi Amin's 1972 expulsion), the UK (especially Leicester, Wembley), Canada, USA (motel and convenience-store entrepreneur communities), South Africa (long-established merchant communities since the 19th c.), and Mauritius. Famously the mother tongue of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel; the medium of Gandhi's autobiography "The Story of My Experiments with Truth" (1925-29). Gujarati script is a Brahmic abugida descended from Devanagari (the script lost the horizontal top line "shirorekha" sometime in the 16th-17th c.). Linguistically: SOV agglutinative, three genders, ergative case in past tense.