The Marathi of this region is the base of the modern standard — the Pune register was adopted by the nineteenth-century printing presses, the school textbooks and the dictionaries, so its features became "correct" Marathi and its neighbours' features became dialect. Underneath that standardisation the plateau is not uniform: Kolhapur and Sangli speech is markedly different in intonation and verb endings, and its speakers are aware of being heard as rustic in Pune. The other decisive fact is older — the sants wrote in ordinary spoken Marathi in the thirteenth century, when Sanskrit was the language of scripture, and that choice is what gave the language a canon.
Puneri (Deshi) MarathiIndo-Aryan, Southern
The Pune and Bhima basin register, codified by the nineteenth-century missionary and Bombay-presidency grammars and taught as standard Marathi. Its distinguishing features are social as much as linguistic — a reputation for clipped, formal address that the city itself jokes about.
Kolhapuri and southern MarathiIndo-Aryan, Southern
Spoken at the ghat foot and through Sangli and Belagavi, with a distinct rising intonation, different second-person forms and a substantial Kannada loan vocabulary that increases towards the Krishna.
Satara–Wai MarathiIndo-Aryan, Southern
The Krishna-valley register, close to standard and often cited as the "purest" spoken Marathi — a claim about prestige rather than about linguistics.
Varkari registerIndo-Aryan, Southern
Not a geographic dialect but a shared devotional idiom carried by the abhanga corpus, in which thirteenth-century vocabulary and metre remain in daily use by people who otherwise speak modern Marathi.
Dhangari and Vadari speechIndo-Aryan
Registers of the pastoral Dhangar and the stone-working Vadari communities, the latter with Telugu substrate — both are counted as Marathi in the census.