South Gujarat Littoral · Western Coastal Strip

Dialect and oral traditions

Speech here is a gradient from a port to a forest. Surti Gujarati carries the vocabulary a trading estuary accumulates — Persian, Portuguese and English words absorbed and naturalised — and a reputation across the state for blunt, inventive idiom and for a distinctive rise at the end of a sentence. Above it on the slope are the Bhil-group speeches, which are transitional between Gujarati and Marathi and shade continuously into each other rather than stopping anywhere. Inside both sits Parsi Gujarati, a sociolect with its own lexicon, its own verb habits and a religious register in Avestan and Pazend that no other Gujarati speaker uses.

Speech varieties

Surti GujaratiIndo-Aryan, Gujarati

The estuary register — heavier on loanwords than any other Gujarati variety, and the source of a large body of urban slang and invective that the rest of the state quotes and affects to disapprove of.

Parsi GujaratiIndo-Aryan, Gujarati sociolect

Distinct in vocabulary, in some verb forms and in a set of kinship and religious terms drawn from Persian and Avestan. It has its own printed literature going back to the nineteenth century and is contracting sharply with the community's numbers.

DhodiaIndo-Aryan, Bhil group

Spoken through Valsad and Navsari on the lower slope, in contact with Gujarati on one side and Kukna on the other.

Speakers: Returned in the census in the low lakhs

Kukna and WarliIndo-Aryan, Bhil group

The Dangs and Valsad speech communities, continuing without a break into the Konkan hills to the south and into the enclave between. Warli is written in both Devanagari and Gujarati script depending on which school system a speaker passed through, which is the clearest evidence that the language is older than the line.

Gamit and ChaudhariIndo-Aryan, Bhil group

Spoken up the Tapi and Purna valleys on the northern and eastern edge of the slope.

MarathiIndo-Aryan, Southern Indo-Aryan

Ordinary in the southern towns and fishing settlements, and the first language of a substantial part of the enclave and the Umbergaon coast. The Gujarati–Marathi transition on this coast is gradual and household by household.

Indigenous terminology

Term	Meaning
Ponk પોંક	Jowar harvested and roasted at the milk stage, before the grain hardens. A ten-week food with no preserved form.
Locho લોચો	A mess or a bungle, and also the dish — an under-set khaman eaten with a spoon. The dish is named after the mistake.
Ubadiyu ઉબાડિયું	Winter vegetables steamed in a sealed earthen pot buried under a fire, with banana leaf, ajwain and green garlic and no oil at all. Undhiyu's plainer village ancestor.
Tarpa તરપા	A gourd-and-bamboo wind instrument, and the chain dance that can only happen while it is being played.
Chauk	The square ritual wall painting made for a Warli wedding, with the goddess Palghat inside it. Painted by married women; the commercial Warli panel is a descendant of it.
Atash Behram	The highest of the three grades of Zoroastrian consecrated fire, requiring sixteen sources of fire and a year of ritual to establish. India has eight, of which one is at Udvada and one at Navsari; the ordinary neighbourhood fire temple is an agiary.
Kusti	The seventy-two-thread lamb's-wool cord tied around the waist, untied and retied at prayer.
Muktad	The ten days at the end of the Zoroastrian year set aside for the remembrance of the dead, when flower vases are set out for named souls in the fire temple.
Thaal	The single large platter from which a Dawoodi Bohra group eats together in a fixed alternating order of sweet and savoury, beginning and ending with a pinch of salt.
Faliyu ફળિયું	A hamlet or cluster of houses, the standard settlement unit on the forest slope. A village is usually a set of faliyas separated by fields rather than one built-up block.
Nagli નાગલી	Finger millet — the staple grain of the slope, and the flour the everyday rotla is made from.
Chandani Padvo ચાંદની પડવો	The autumn full-moon night on which Surat eats ghari on its rooftops. The sweet and the date are inseparable in local usage.

Sayings

Saying	Literally	Meaning
Surat nu jaman ane Kashi nu maran	Food in Surat and death in Kashi	The oldest compliment paid to the city — the two best things available anywhere, one of them here. It is quoted constantly and usually while eating.
Surat sonani murat	Surat, a figure of gold	A merchant town's description of itself, dating from the period when it was the empire's principal port.
Doodh ma sakar	Sugar in milk	From the Qissa-i-Sanjan account of the Parsi landing — asked to explain how a full country could take more people, the priest is said to have stirred sugar into a full bowl of milk without spilling it. The phrase is used as shorthand for absorbing without displacing, and it is a story about arrival told by the arrivals.
Aa to locho thai gayo	This has turned into a locho	Ordinary Gujarati for a situation gone soft and shapeless. Surat is the one place where the same sentence can also be a description of breakfast.

Speech varieties, indigenous terminology and sayings of South Gujarat Littoral. (16)