Gujarati Huinga ki te kōrero

Mo Gujarati kupu ki te kōrero

The Gujarati script is derived from Devanagari but drops the horizontal headline bar (shirorekha) that runs across the top of Hindi and Marathi letters, giving it a distinct look and meaning a text-to-speech renderer tuned to find that bar for letter segmentation has to be adapted. Phonetically Gujarati is unusual for having murmured or breathy-voiced vowels — a phonation contrast where a vowel can be pronounced with a breathy quality that changes the word — which few other Indian languages carry and which a voice must reproduce to sound authentic. Like other Indo-Aryan languages Gujarati has schwa-deletion rules governing when the inherent vowel is silent, plus the full aspirated/unaspirated and dental/retroflex consonant contrasts. Its abugida stacks conjunct consonants, and the language marks nasalization that the voice must render. Because so many Gujarati speakers live abroad, natural handling of English loanwords woven into Gujarati text is also valuable. Demand is driven by Gujarat's media and commerce, a very large mercantile diaspora in the UK, the US and East Africa that consumes Gujarati news and religious content, and government and education services within the state.