Saurashtri dialect
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- Work cat.: Bhasha turni : padyam-vyakaranam bhag, 1975.
- Lesser known lang.:p. 174 (Saurashtri; g. Gujarati; a. Saurashtra, Saurastra; Sawrashtra, Sourashtra, Sowrashtra)
- Voegelin:p. 166, under Gujarati (Saurashtra (the speech of educated speakers in the state of Gujarat; Patnuli=Saurashtri))
- Ethnologue:p. 254, under Gujarati (dialects, Patnuli, Saurashtri)
Saurashtra (Saurashtra script: ꢱꣃꢬꢵꢰ꣄ꢜ꣄ꢬ ꢩꢵꢰꢵ, 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. The language has its own script of the same name, but is also written in the Tamil, Telugu, and Devanagari scripts. The Saurashtra script is of Brahmic origin, although its exact derivation is not known. Unlike most of the surrounding Dravidian languages, Saurashtra is Indo-European. There is some debate amongst speakers of the Saurashtra language as to which script is best suited to the language. Census of India places the language under Gujarati. Official figures show the number of speakers as 247,702 (2011 census).
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