🇮🇳Marathi for English speakers

1. Marathi and its world

Marathi — मराठी, marāṭhī — is a major Indo-Aryan language of western India, centred on the state of Maharashtra. Ethnologue gives 83 million first-language speakers (2011 Indian census) plus 12.2 million second-language users (2001 census), for around 95.3 million total users; that makes it the third most-spoken first language in India, after Hindi and Bengali.¹ Its ISO 639-3 code is mar and its Glottocode is mara1378.²

Beyond Maharashtra there are Marathi-speaking communities in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, and a distinctive enclave variety in Thanjavur District, Tamil Nadu, with at least 100,000 speakers and heavy Tamil and Kannada lexical influence.¹ Mumbai — the commercial capital of India — is a Marathi city, though a famously multilingual one.

Marathi is a statutory provincial language, listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution since 1950, and Ethnologue rates it EGIDS 2 (Provincial) and not endangered.¹ It is a fully developed literary language with a Bible tradition running from 1821 and 77% first-language literacy at the 2001 census.¹ In October 2024 the Government of India designated Marathi a Classical Language of India — a status carrying research funding and academic recognition. This guide's research dossier flags that designation as needing confirmation against a primary government source, so treat it as reported rather than as verified here.³

Ethnologue's typological summary, captured verbatim, is a compact statement of everything this guide will unpack:¹

SOV; postpositions; noun head final; gender (masculine/feminine/neuter); no articles; case-marking (7 cases); verb affixes mark person, number; passives; tense and aspect; 37 consonants, 8 vowels, 2 diphthongs; non-tonal.

Why learn Marathi as an English speaker

• Ninety-five million speakers, a state of 125 million people, and Mumbai — and yet almost no foreigners learn it. Speakers notice, and respond warmly.
• It is the most conservative of the big modern Indo-Aryan languages in one striking respect: it kept the Sanskrit neuter gender, which Hindi lost.
• It is a genuinely instructive language to study. Split ergativity, differential object marking and the inclusive/exclusive ‘we’ are all live and all visible in ordinary sentences.
• Marathi literature, theatre and cinema are among the strongest regional traditions in India, and a great deal of it is untranslated.

What to expect from this guide

Marathi's grammar is more demanding than Javanese or Sundanese and less demanding than its reputation. There is no politeness-register vocabulary to learn; instead there is real morphology — three genders, a case system, and a past tense that reorganises the whole sentence. This guide teaches standard written Marathi in the Devanagari script, in the Pune-region variety that underlies the school standard, and it does not use romanisation as a crutch: every Marathi form appears in Devanagari with a transliteration beside it.

2. The script and the sounds

Marathi is written in Devanagari, in the variant known as Balbodh (बाळबोध, ‘understandable to children’). It is the same script as Hindi and Sanskrit with two extra letters that Hindi does not use, and it is an abugida: every consonant letter carries an inherent a which is cancelled or replaced by a vowel sign.

The vowels and their dependent signs

The consonants run in the classical five-by-five varga arrangement, and the row that matters most for an English speaker is the retroflex series. Marathi contrasts dental त थ द ध न (tongue against the teeth) with retroflex ट ठ ड ढ ण (tongue curled back), and each of those pairs is also split by aspiration. English t and d sit between the two Marathi series and match neither.

The five stop series

Marathi additionally has ळ (ḷ), a retroflex lateral that Hindi lacks entirely, and it is extremely common — शाळा śāḷā ‘school’, वेळ veḷ ‘time’, पाऊल pāūl ‘footstep’. Marathi also retains ऱ (ṟa) in some spellings. Both are among the letters Balbodh adds to the Hindi repertoire.⁴

Two pronunciation habits to build early. First, aspiration is phonemic: क and ख are different letters and different words, and an English speaker's unmarked /k/ sits awkwardly between them. Second, schwa deletion: the inherent a at the end of a word is normally not pronounced, so घर is ghar, not ghara. Transliterations in reference grammars often write the schwa that speakers drop, which is why you will see both ghara and ghar in print.⁵ Marathi is non-tonal, which is one fewer thing to worry about than in many Asian languages.¹

Historically Marathi was also written in the Modi script, a cursive system used for administration and correspondence from roughly the thirteenth century until the mid twentieth. Modi is encoded in Unicode and has a small revival movement, but nothing practical is published in it today; Balbodh Devanagari is what you need.

3. First words, and the pronoun that English does not have

Greetings and survival phrases

One charming detail: the everyday way to take your leave is येतो yeto if you are a man and येते yete if you are a woman — literally ‘I'll come’, never ‘I'm going’. The verb agrees with your own gender, which is a good early reminder that Marathi tracks gender everywhere.

Marathi has three grammatical persons, and in the first person plural it makes a distinction English cannot: inclusive versus exclusive ‘we’. आम्ही āmhī means ‘we, not including you’; आपण āpaṇ means ‘we, including you’.⁵ This is a feature Marathi shares with the Dravidian languages, Rajasthani and Gujarati, and it is unusual within Indo-European.⁵ Choosing wrongly is not ungrammatical — it just says something you did not mean.

Personal pronouns

Note that आपण does double duty: inclusive ‘we’ and extremely formal ‘you’.⁵ Note too that तू is genuinely familiar — used to children, close friends and family — and that तुम्ही is the safe default for an adult stranger, exactly like French vous.

Practice reader — A1 story: माझं घर (My house)

This passage is a constructed teaching text, assembled for this guide rather than quoted from a published source. It uses only present-tense verbs — no perfective, so no ergative yet. Its vocabulary has been checked word by word against this guide's 509-card deck: every content word is on a card in its dictionary form (the deck cites verbs as -णे infinitives and nouns in the direct singular, so what you see here are those same words inflected by the rules of sections 5 to 7), and anything with no card behind it at all is glossed in the table below. Watch the verb endings: मीरा is a woman, so she says राहते and पिते, and her father takes the honorific plural पितात.

नमस्कार! माझं नाव मीरा आहे. मी पुण्यात राहते. माझं घर लहान पण स्वच्छ आहे. माझ्या खोलीत एक टेबल, एक खुर्ची आणि एक बिछाना आहे. एक खिडकी सुद्धा आहे. रोज सकाळी मी चहा पिते. माझे वडील कॉफी पितात. माझी आई भात आणि भाजी करते. माझ्या घरातलं अन्न खूप चांगलं आहे.

माझ्या घरात दोन लहान मुलं आहेत. माझा भाऊ लहान आहे; त्याचं नाव अजय आहे. माझी बहीण मोठी आहे; तिचं नाव सई आहे. अजय सात वर्षांचा आहे, सई अकरा वर्षांची आहे. दोघे शाळेत जातात. मी विद्यापीठात शिकते. रोज मी विद्यापीठात जाते. स्थानक माझ्या घराजवळ आहे, म्हणून मी थकत नाही. रेल्वे जलद आणि स्वच्छ आहे.

विद्यापीठात मी भाषा आणि इतिहास शिकते. माझे मित्र खूप आहेत. मला पुस्तक वाचायला आवडतं आणि गोष्ट लिहायला आवडतं. मला खेळ आवडत नाही. माझे शिक्षक हळू आणि सोपं शिकवतात. जर मला समजत नाही, तर मी विचारते. मग ते सांगतात. दुपारी मी शाळेजवळच्या हॉटेलात जेवते. ते हॉटेल लहान पण चांगलं आहे. मी भात, भाजी आणि पोळी घेते, आणि पाणी पिते. किंमत कमी आहे.

संध्याकाळी मी घरी येते. मी हळू चालते. आकाश लाल आहे. रस्त्यावर एक काळं मांजर आणि एक लहान कुत्रा आहे. एका झाडावर पक्षी बसतात. वारा थंड आहे. रात्री मी वाचते, मग झोपते. उद्या मी आईबरोबर बाजारात जाईन. मी खूप आनंदी आहे.

मला माझं शहर आवडतं. पुण्यात खूप शाळा आणि विद्यापीठं आहेत, आणि खूप लोक आहेत. इथे बाग आहे, मंदिर आहे, आणि मोठा बाजार आहे. उन्हाळ्यात खूप गरम असतं आणि पावसाळ्यात रोज पाऊस पडतो. मला पाऊस आवडतो. माझे आजोबा आणि आजी गावात राहतात. दर वर्षी आम्ही त्यांच्याकडे जातो. तिथे शेत आहे, गाय आहे, आणि रात्री खूप तारे दिसतात.

Translation. Hello! My name is Meera. I live in Pune. My house is small but clean. In my room there is a table, a chair and a bed. There is a window too. Every morning I drink tea. My father drinks coffee. My mother makes rice and vegetables. The food in my house is very good. — In my house there are two small children. My brother is younger; his name is Ajay. My sister is older; her name is Sai. Ajay is seven years old, Sai is eleven. Both go to school. I study at the university. Every day I go to the university. The station is near my house, so I don't get tired. The train is fast and clean. — At the university I study language and history. I have many friends. I like reading books and writing stories. I don't like sport. My teachers teach slowly and simply. If I don't understand, I ask. Then they explain. At midday I eat at a restaurant near the school. That restaurant is small but good. I take rice, vegetables and flatbread, and drink water. The price is low. — In the evening I come home. I walk slowly. The sky is red. On the road there is a black cat and a small dog. At night I read, then sleep. Tomorrow I will go to the market with my mother. I am very happy.

Reader glossary — forms not on the flashcard deck

4. Numbers and time

Marathi numerals

Two things English speakers should note. Marathi, like the rest of South Asia, counts in lakhs: एक लक्ष ek lakṣa is one hundred thousand, and larger sums are habitually expressed in lakhs and crores rather than in millions. And the teens and tens are irregular enough that they have to be memorised individually rather than derived — एकोणीस ‘nineteen’ is literally ‘one-less-than-twenty’, a pattern that recurs throughout the system.

Time words

The days of the week are सोमवार somvār (Monday), मंगळवार, बुधवार, गुरुवार, शुक्रवार, शनिवार, रविवार — the Sanskrit planetary names, transparent to anyone who has met them in Hindi or Sanskrit.

5. Three genders, and the direct/oblique split

Marathi nouns inflect for gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), number (singular, plural) and case.⁵ The neuter is the headline: Marathi preserves the Sanskrit three-gender system, where Hindi merged neuter into masculine and most Romance languages lost it entirely.⁵ There are no articles, so a bare noun can be definite or indefinite according to context.

There are no watertight rules for assigning gender, but the final vowel narrows it a great deal, and Marathi grammar names nouns after that vowel: akārānta (अकारान्त, ending in the inherent a), ākārānta (ending in आ), īkārānta (ending in ई), and so on. Masculine nouns can only be akārānta or ākārānta; neuter nouns can only be akārānta, īkārānta, ukārānta or ekārānta.⁵

Deriving feminine nouns from masculine ones

A neat side effect: for masculine ākārānta nouns naming inanimate objects, the diminutive (लघुत्वदर्शक laghutvadarśaka) is feminine and īkārānta. दंडा daṇḍā is a big stick and दंडी daṇḍī a small one; लोटा loṭā a big mug and लोटी loṭī a small one.⁵ Size and gender are linked in a way that has no English parallel.

Before any postposition, a Marathi noun changes shape. This modified stem is the oblique — traditional Marathi grammar calls it the सामान्य रूप sāmānya rūp. So घोडा ghoḍā ‘horse’ becomes घोड्या- ghoḍyā- before वर -var ‘on’, giving घोड्यावर ghoḍyāvar ‘on the horse’.⁵ Learn every noun with its oblique, exactly as you would learn a German noun with its plural.

How many cases Marathi has is genuinely disputed. Dhongde and Wali describe a two-case system — direct and oblique — with everything else handled by adpositions and postpositions.⁶ Ethnologue counts seven.¹ The traditional analysis, following the Sanskrit grammatical tradition, counts eight विभक्ती vibhaktī.⁵ All three describe the same facts; they differ on where to draw the line between a case ending and a postposition. The table below gives the traditional set, which is what Marathi schoolbooks use.

The eight traditional vibhaktī

The locative pair repays attention. घरात gharāt and घरी gharī both mean ‘in/at the house’, but -त implies location inside a well-defined area in space or time, while -ई implies a less well-defined place or concept. Pandharipande's analogy is exactly right: the difference is that between ‘in a house’ and ‘at home’.⁷

Practice reader — A2 story: बाजारात (At the market)

A second constructed teaching text. It stays in the present tense — again avoiding the ergative — but adds direct speech, plurals, postpositions and the genitive. Notice how often the verb ending tells you the gender of the subject: सई बसते but दुकानदार म्हणतो. Vocabulary audited against the deck; the rest is glossed below.

रविवारी सई आणि तिची आई बाजारात जातात. गावातला बाजार मोठा आणि गजबजलेला आहे. पुढे एक दुकान आहे; तिथे भात आणि मासा मिळतो. मागे लोक भाजी, फळं, मीठ आणि साखर विकतात. सईची आई एक कोंबडी, दहा अंडी आणि खूप भाजी विकत घेते. सई पिशवी धरते, आई पैसे देते.

“हे काय आहे?” सई विचारते. “हा आंबा आहे,” आई म्हणते. “खूप गोड आहे. किंमत किती?” “पंचवीस रुपये,” दुकानदार म्हणतो. सईची आई थोडा विचार करते, मग म्हणते: “महाग आहे. वीस रुपये चालेल का?” तो माणूस हसतो आणि म्हणतो: “बरं, तुमच्यासाठी.”

नंतर सई आणि तिची आई बाजाराच्या दारजवळच्या हॉटेलात जातात. तिथे तीन टेबलं आणि आठ खुर्च्या आहेत. सई बसते, आई तिच्या जवळ बसते. सई भात, भाजी आणि पोळी खाते. आई गरम चहा पिते. अन्न चांगलं आहे आणि किंमत जास्त नाही. त्या हॉटेलात खूप लोक आहेत: काही माणसं कॉफी पितात, काही बायका मोठ्याने बोलतात, एक लहान मूल टेबलाखाली खेळतं.

जेवण झाल्यावर सई आणि तिची आई घरी जातात. सूर्य खूप गरम आहे, म्हणून दोघी झाडाखालून हळू चालतात. रस्त्यावर एक कुत्रा झोपतो आणि वर एक पक्षी उडतो. “उद्या मला पुन्हा इथे यायचं आहे,” सई म्हणते. आई हसते आणि म्हणते: “बरं, पण उद्या तू पैसे देशील.” सई मोठ्याने हसते. त्या रात्री ती तिच्या वडिलांना बाजाराबद्दल, आंब्याबद्दल आणि हसणाऱ्या माणसाबद्दल सांगते.

सईला बाजार खूप आवडतो. तिथे नेहमी काहीतरी नवीन असतं: रंगीत कपडे, गरम अन्न, मोठा आवाज आणि अनोळखी माणसं. तिची आई म्हणते की बाजार हा गावाचा आरसा आहे. तिथे गेल्यावर तुम्हाला कळतं की लोक काय खातात, काय घालतात आणि कशाबद्दल बोलतात. सई अजून लहान आहे, पण तिला हे समजायला लागलं आहे.

Translation. On Sunday Sai and her mother go to the market. The village market is big and bustling. In front there is a shop; rice and fish are available there. Behind, people sell vegetables, fruit, salt and sugar. Sai's mother buys one chicken, ten eggs and a lot of vegetables. Sai holds the bag, her mother pays. — “What is this?” Sai asks. “This is a mango,” says her mother. “It is very sweet. How much is it?” “Twenty-five rupees,” says the shopkeeper. Sai's mother thinks for a moment, then says: “That's expensive. Will twenty rupees do?” The man laughs and says: “All right, for you.” — Afterwards Sai and her mother go to a restaurant near the market gate. There are three tables and eight chairs there. Sai sits down, her mother sits near her. Sai eats rice, vegetables and flatbread. Her mother drinks hot tea. The food is good and the price is not high. There are a lot of people in that restaurant: some men are drinking coffee, some women are talking loudly, a small child is playing under a table. — After the meal Sai and her mother go home. The sun is very hot, so the two of them walk slowly along under the trees. On the road a dog is sleeping and above a bird is flying. “Tomorrow I want to come here again,” says Sai. Her mother laughs and says: “All right, but tomorrow you'll pay.” Sai laughs loudly. That night she tells her father about the market, about the mango, and about the man who laughed.

Reader glossary — forms not on the flashcard deck

6. Adjectives: the ones that change and the ones that don't

Marathi adjectives precede their noun and fall into two classes. Declinable adjectives end in the vowel -आ and must agree with the noun in gender, number and case. Everything else is indeclinable and never changes at all.⁵ This is a genuinely easy rule with a big payoff: if an adjective does not end in आ, you can stop worrying about it.

Declinable versus indeclinable adjectives

The demonstratives हा ‘this’ and तो ‘that’ are always declined for the gender and number of what follows:⁵ हा/ही/हे for singular masculine, feminine and neuter, हे/ह्या/ही in the plural; तो/ती/ते singular, ते/त्या/ती plural. The possessives work the same way — माझा/माझी/माझे ‘my’ agrees with the thing possessed, not with me.⁵

7. The verb

Marathi verbs are cited in the infinitive, which ends in -णे -ṇe: खाणे khāṇe ‘to eat’, बोलणे bolaṇe ‘to speak’, चालणे cālaṇe ‘to walk’.⁵ They are strikingly regular; the copula and a few auxiliaries are the exceptions.

The system is built out of three aspects (perfect, imperfect, habitual) crossed with three tenses (present, past, future). Tense is carried by conjugation; aspect by suffixes plus a conjugated auxiliary.⁵ The auxiliary you will meet first and use constantly is असणे asaṇe ‘to be’, which is irregular.

असणे ‘to be’ — the copula

Imperatives are formed from the stem, with a formal/informal distinction in the singular. For akārānta verbs the informal imperative is the bare stem and the formal adds -आ: तू बोल tū bol ‘speak!’ but तुम्ही बोला tumhī bolā. Negative imperatives take -ऊ on the stem plus a separate particle नकोस/नको (informal) or नका (formal): तू बोलू नकोस, तुम्ही बोलू नका ‘don't speak’.⁵

Imperatives, positive and negative

Causatives are productive and formed in three main ways: by adding व/वि to the stem (हसणे ‘to laugh’ → हसवणे ‘to make laugh’; चालणे ‘to walk’ → चालवणे ‘to drive, to make go’); by adding ववि to monosyllabic stems (खाणे → खावविणे ‘to cause to eat’); or by changing the root vowel, a → ā, u/ū → o, i/ī → e (तुटणे ‘to break’ intransitive → तोडणे ‘to break’ transitive).⁵ That last pattern is the same intransitive/transitive alternation English does with lie/lay and rise/raise.

8. Split ergativity: the sentence turns inside out

This is the hard part of Marathi, and it is worth meeting head-on. In the present tense, Marathi behaves like English: the subject is unmarked and the verb agrees with it.

मुलगा पुरी खातो — mulgā purī khāto — ‘the boy eats puri’ (boy.MASC.SG / puri.FEM.SG / eat-MASC.SG.PRS)

Now put it in the past. Two things change at once. The subject takes the ergative marker -ने, and the verb stops agreeing with the subject and starts agreeing with the object:⁶

मुलाने पुरी खाल्ली — mulā-ne purī khā-llī — ‘the boy ate puri’ (boy.MASC.SG-ERG / puri.FEM.SG / eat-FEM.SG.PST)

खाल्ली is feminine because पुरी is feminine. The boy has been demoted, grammatically speaking, from the thing the verb tracks to a marked oblique participant. This is split ergativity: Marathi uses nominative-accusative alignment in some places and ergative-absolutive alignment in others, and the ergative marker is identical in form to the instrumental case.⁸

The split is aspect-based, as it is across Indo-Aryan: it is triggered by the perfective, and only for transitive verbs.⁹ Two further environments take ergative subjects: intransitive subjects in the obligative subjunctive, and third-person subjects in the optative.⁷

The ergative in five environments

The third row is the one that surprises people. If there is no unmarked noun anywhere in the clause — subject ergative, instrument instrumental — the verb has nothing to agree with, so it falls back on neutral (neuter singular) agreement.⁸ Marathi grammar is not guessing; it has a default.

Differential object marking

A second complication interlocks with the first. Marathi marks direct objects differentially, according to definiteness and animacy: the accusative -ला appears on definite or animate objects and is absent on indefinite inanimate ones.¹⁰

मुलगा दगड फेकत आहे — mulagā dagaḍ phekat āhe — ‘the boy is throwing (some) rocks’

मुलगा दगडाला फेकत आहे — mulagā dagaḍālā phekat āhe — ‘the boy is throwing (the) rock’

Since Marathi has no articles, this is how definiteness gets expressed. There is a competing analysis on which Marathi does not mark accusative at all, and -ला is a single marker shared between the dative and definite object marking — which would make Marathi look more like Spanish a than like Latin.¹¹ Either way, the practical rule is the same: put -ला on a specific or animate object, leave it off a vague or inanimate one.

One word-order consequence: a sentence with both an unmarked subject and an unmarked object must be SOV, because nothing else distinguishes them. Only when the subject is a pronoun or ergative-marked can you reorder for emphasis — दगड तो फेकत आहे ‘rocks, he is throwing’.¹⁰

Practice reader — B1 story: शाळेतून घरी (Home from school)

A constructed teaching text, and the first one in the past tense — which means it is wall-to-wall ergative. Track every -ने on a subject and check what the verb has agreed with. The fourth paragraph steps out of the story and explains the rule in Marathi, so you are reading grammatical prose about the very construction you are reading. Words not on the deck are glossed below.

काल संध्याकाळी अजय शाळेतून घरी आला. तो खूप थकला होता. त्याने दप्तर टेबलावर ठेवलं आणि पाणी प्यायलं. त्याच्या आईने विचारलं: “आज शाळेत काय झालं?” अजय हसला आणि म्हणाला: “आज आम्ही मराठीचा तास घेतला. शिक्षकांनी एक गोष्ट सांगितली.”

“कोणती गोष्ट?” आईने विचारलं. अजयने खुर्चीवर बसून सांगितलं: “एका गावात एक गरीब माणूस राहत होता. त्याच्याकडे एक घोडा होता. एके दिवशी त्या माणसाने घोडा बाजारात नेला आणि विकला. त्याने त्या पैशांनी बी विकत घेतलं आणि शेतात पेरलं. पुढच्या वर्षी त्याला खूप धान्य मिळालं.”

आईने मान हलवली. “चांगली गोष्ट आहे. तुला काय समजलं?” अजयने थोडा विचार केला. मग तो म्हणाला: “मला असं वाटतं की माणसाने आजचा विचार आणि उद्याचा विचार दोन्ही केला पाहिजे.” आई हसली आणि म्हणाली: “बरोबर. आता हात धू आणि जेवायला ये.”

इथे व्याकरणाची एक गोष्ट पहा. वर्तमानकाळात मराठी क्रियापद कर्त्याशी जुळतं: “अजय हसतो.” पण भूतकाळात, जेव्हा क्रियापद सकर्मक असतं, तेव्हा कर्त्याला -ने लागतं आणि क्रियापद कर्माशी जुळतं: “अजयने गोष्ट सांगितली” — गोष्ट स्त्रीलिंगी आहे, म्हणून सांगितली. जर कर्म नसेल, तर क्रियापद नपुंसकलिंगी होतं. हे मराठीचं सर्वात महत्त्वाचं वैशिष्ट्य आहे.

हे नियम सुरुवातीला कठीण वाटतात, पण थोड्या सरावानंतर ते सोपे होतात. एक चांगली सवय अशी आहे: प्रत्येक भूतकाळातलं वाक्य वाचताना थांबा आणि स्वतःला विचारा — इथे कर्ता कोण आहे, त्याला -ने लागलं आहे का, आणि क्रियापद कोणत्या शब्दाशी जुळत आहे? जर तुम्ही हे शंभर वाक्यांत केलं, तर नंतर तुम्हाला विचार करावा लागणार नाही. भाषा अशीच शिकली जाते: नियम समजून घ्यायचे, मग ते विसरायचे.

Translation. Yesterday evening Ajay came home from school. He was very tired. He put his school bag on the table and drank some water. His mother asked: “What happened at school today?” Ajay laughed and said: “Today we had a Marathi lesson. The teacher told a story.” — “Which story?” his mother asked. Ajay sat down on a chair and said: “In a village there lived a poor man. He had a horse. One day that man took the horse to the market and sold it. With that money he bought seed and sowed it in his field. The following year he got a great deal of grain.” — His mother nodded. “It's a good story. What did you understand from it?” Ajay thought for a moment. Then he said: “It seems to me that a person should think about today and about tomorrow, both.” His mother laughed and said: “Correct. Now wash your hands and come and eat.” — Look here at one point of grammar. In the present tense the Marathi verb agrees with the subject: “Ajay laughs.” But in the past tense, when the verb is transitive, the subject takes -ne and the verb agrees with the object: “Ajay told a story” — goṣṭ is feminine, so sāṅgitalī. If there is no object, the verb becomes neuter. This is the single most important feature of Marathi.

Reader glossary

9. प्रयोग: the traditional analysis of voice

Traditional Marathi grammar recognises three prayoga (प्रयोग), which map onto the agreement facts of the previous section but come at them from the other direction — they classify sentences by what the verb agrees with.⁵

The three prayoga

This is worth dwelling on, because it is a genuinely different way of cutting up the same territory. What a European grammar calls ‘the perfective with an ergative subject’, Marathi tradition calls the passive — and it has a point: the verb really is agreeing with the patient. And bhāve prayoga, the voice in which the verb agrees with nothing at all, has no English name, because English has no such thing. It is used for imperatives, and it is the same neutral agreement that appeared in मुलाने चमच्याने खाल्ले in section 8.

Which framework you adopt does not change what you have to say; it changes what you find surprising. If you learn Marathi from an Indian textbook you will meet prayoga; if you learn it from Dhongde and Wali or from Pandharipande you will meet split ergativity.⁶⁷ Both are describing the sentence मुलाने पुरी खाल्ली.

A word on word order more generally. Marathi is SOV — subject (कर्ता), object (कर्म), verb (क्रियापद) — and Dryer's WALS datapoint records it as such.¹² But there is no hard restriction, and poetry, especially the powāḍā ballad tradition, reorders freely for emphasis, metre and rhyme.⁵ Postpositions, however, are fixed: they follow their noun, always, and they trigger the oblique.

10. Variation, and which Marathi to learn

The prestige standard is the Marathi of the Pune region, and the grammatical rules described by the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad and endorsed by the Government of Maharashtra take precedence in standard written Marathi. Those rules are set out in M. R. Walimbe's Marathi Vyākaraṇ, the book every Maharashtrian schoolchild is referred to.⁵ This guide follows that standard.

Marathi linguistic tradition gives special status to tatsama (तत्सम) words — words borrowed unchanged from Sanskrit — and expects them to follow Sanskrit grammatical rules rather than Marathi ones.⁵ This produces a visible register split: formal, literary and technical Marathi is heavily Sanskritised, while everyday speech uses a large stock of tadbhava (inherited) and Persian, Arabic and English loans. विद्यापीठ vidyāpīṭh ‘university’ is a coined tatsama; हॉटेल hôṭel is not.

Marathi varieties

The Thanjavur community is the most linguistically remarkable of these: Marathi speakers settled in the Tamil country under the Bhonsle dynasty of Thanjavur in the seventeenth century, and their descendants still speak Marathi some 1,300 kilometres from Maharashtra.¹ Ethnologue also records Marathi as a second language for speakers of twenty-five or more smaller languages of the region, and notes Hindu, Muslim and Jewish (Bene Israel, Mumbai) Marathi-speaking communities.¹

11. What English speakers get wrong

• Ignoring aspiration. क and ख are different letters. An unaspirated English /k/ will be heard as क every time, which is often the wrong word.
• Using an English /t/ and /d/. These land between the dental and retroflex series and match neither. Pick one deliberately.
• Forgetting ळ. It is not ल. शाळा and साला are different words.
• Keeping the subject as the agreement controller in the past tense. This is the big one: मुलाने पुरी खाल्ला is wrong; पुरी is feminine, so खाल्ली.
• Forgetting -ने on a perfective transitive subject. Present मुलगा खातो, past मुलाने खाल्ली — the subject changes shape.
• Putting -ला on every object. It marks definite or animate objects only; on an indefinite inanimate one it is wrong.
• Using आम्ही when you mean आपण. Saying ‘we’ while excluding the person in front of you is a small social bruise.
• Using तू with an adult stranger. Default to तुम्ही.
• Declining indeclinable adjectives. Only adjectives ending in आ agree. सुंदर never changes.
• Assuming Hindi will carry over. Much vocabulary does; the neuter gender, the inclusive/exclusive we, ळ, and the -णे infinitive do not.

Practice reader — B2 story: लिपी आणि भाषा (Script and language)

A constructed teaching text at the level of a newspaper feature, using the habitual past, the passive, conjunctive participles and a good deal of tatsama vocabulary — exactly the register in which Marathi discusses itself. Everything it asserts about Modi script and the standard is sourced in sections 2 and 10 above; the literary names are matters of record.

मराठी भाषेला मोठा इतिहास आहे. जुन्या काळात लोक मोडी लिपीत लिहीत असत. मोडी ही वळणदार लिपी होती आणि ती कारभारासाठी आणि पत्रांसाठी वापरली जात असे. आज मात्र जवळजवळ सगळं मराठी साहित्य देवनागरीत, म्हणजे बाळबोध लिपीत, छापलं जातं. मोडी लिपी युनिकोडमध्ये आहे आणि तिच्या पुनरुज्जीवनासाठी काही लोक काम करतात, पण रोजच्या व्यवहारात ती दिसत नाही.

मराठी साहित्यही तितकंच जुनं आहे. तेराव्या शतकात ज्ञानेश्वरांनी ज्ञानेश्वरी लिहिली, आणि नंतर तुकाराम, नामदेव आणि इतर संतांनी अभंग रचले. या कवितांची भाषा साधी आहे, पण त्यातला विचार खोल आहे. म्हणूनच आजही लोक ती गातात आणि ऐकतात.

आधुनिक काळात मराठी रंगभूमी आणि मराठी चित्रपट खूप महत्त्वाचे आहेत. मुंबईत आणि पुण्यात दर वर्षी नवीन नाटकं होतात. मराठी वर्तमानपत्रं रोज लाखो लोक वाचतात. मराठी विकिपीडियावर हजारो लेख आहेत, आणि ते मुक्त परवान्याखाली उपलब्ध आहेत.

पण भाषेचं भविष्य फक्त पुस्तकांवर अवलंबून नाही. मुंबईसारख्या मोठ्या शहरात अनेक मुलं इंग्रजी शाळेत शिकतात आणि घरी हिंदी किंवा इंग्रजी बोलतात. जर मुलांनी मराठी फक्त वर्गात शिकली आणि घरी वापरली नाही, तर भाषा हळूहळू कमी होईल. भाषा टिकवणारे सरकार नसतं; कुटुंब आणि शेजारी असतात.

याचा अर्थ असा नाही की इंग्रजी शिकू नये. उलट, आजच्या जगात दोन किंवा तीन भाषा येणं ही मोठी संपत्ती आहे. पण एक भाषा शिकण्यासाठी दुसरी सोडावी लागत नाही. जे मूल घरी मराठी बोलतं आणि शाळेत इंग्रजी शिकतं, ते दोन्ही भाषांमध्ये चांगलं होऊ शकतं. अडचण तेव्हा येते जेव्हा आईवडील स्वतःच्या भाषेला कमी लेखतात. भाषेला किंमत देणं हे घरातून सुरू होतं.

Translation. The Marathi language has a long history. In the old days people used to write in the Modi script. Modi was a cursive script and it was used for administration and for letters. Today, however, almost all Marathi literature is printed in Devanagari, that is, in the Balbodh script. The Modi script is in Unicode and some people work for its revival, but it does not appear in everyday use. — Marathi literature is just as old. In the thirteenth century Dnyaneshwar wrote the Dnyaneshwari, and later Tukaram, Namdev and other poet-saints composed abhangas. The language of these poems is simple, but the thought in them is deep. That is precisely why people still sing and listen to them today. — In the modern period Marathi theatre and Marathi cinema are very important. New plays are staged every year in Mumbai and Pune. Hundreds of thousands of people read Marathi newspapers every day. There are thousands of articles on Marathi Wikipedia, and they are available under a free licence. — But the future of a language does not depend on books alone. In a big city like Mumbai many children study in English-medium schools and speak Hindi or English at home. If children learn Marathi only in the classroom and do not use it at home, the language will gradually diminish. What keeps a language alive is not the government; it is families and neighbours.

Reader glossary

12. Books, media and culture in Marathi

Marathi has one of the deepest regional literary and performance traditions in India, running continuously from the thirteenth century to a very lively present.

Reading

• The Varkari poet-saints — ज्ञानेश्वर (Dnyaneshwar), whose Dnyaneshwari (c. 1290) is a Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita and the foundation stone of the literature; तुकाराम (Tukaram) and नामदेव (Namdev), whose abhangas are still sung daily. Simple language, very deep water.
• Modern fiction — the twentieth-century novel and short story, from Hari Narayan Apte through V. S. Khandekar (Jnanpith laureate, 1974) to Bhalchandra Nemade (Jnanpith laureate, 2014), whose Kosla (1963) is the standard recommendation for a first modern Marathi novel.
• Newspapers — Loksatta, Maharashtra Times, Lokmat and Sakal are the major Marathi dailies, all with free web editions and all excellent graded reading once you can handle tatsama vocabulary.
• Marathi Wikipedia (मराठी विकिपीडिया) — tens of thousands of articles under a free licence, in standard written Marathi.
• Reference — Molesworth's Dictionary, Marathi and English (1857) is long out of copyright and still consulted; Walimbe's Marathi Vyākaraṇ is the standard prescriptive grammar in Marathi.⁵

Watching and listening

• Marathi cinema — one of the strongest film industries in India. Shwaas (2004) and Court (2014) were India's official Academy Award submissions; Sairat (2016) became the highest-grossing Marathi film ever made. Subtitled and widely available.
• Marathi theatre — रंगभूमी, an institution with its own history and its own audiences; Vijay Tendulkar's plays are the best-known internationally.
• Music — abhang and bhavgeet for the classical and semi-classical tradition; lavani and powāḍā for the folk and narrative-ballad traditions. Lata Mangeshkar's and Asha Bhosle's Marathi recordings are a good entry point.
• Broadcast — Marathi-language news channels and All India Radio's Marathi services carry standard spoken Marathi at natural speed.

• Ethnologue — Marathi (mar) — Speaker figures, EGIDS status, the typological summary quoted in section 1, and the Thanjavur enclave.
• Glottolog 5.3 — Marathi (mara1378) — Classification and links onward to WALS, PHOIBLE, Grambank and IMTVault.
• Wikipedia — Marathi grammar — The case system, split ergativity, differential object marking, adjectives, verbs and the three prayoga.
• Wikipedia — Marathi language — History, script, dialects and the Balbodh letter inventory.
• Beck, Butt & Deo, “Tracking Case Innovation: A Perspective from Marathi” (2021) — The differential object marking analysis used in section 8.
• Legate, “Split ergativity based on nominal type” (2014) — Lingua 148: 183–212. The aspectual basis of the Marathi ergative split.
• Carey, A Grammar of the Marathi Language (1805) — The first modern grammar of Marathi, printed at Serampore. Of historical interest, and out of copyright.
• Dhongde & Wali, Marathi (2009) — London Oriental and African Language Library 13. The standard modern reference grammar in English.

13. Where the language goes deepest

Three things separate a very good learner of Marathi from someone who has the language whole.

The first is the tatsama register. Formal Marathi reaches into Sanskrit at will, and Marathi grammatical tradition holds that tatsama words carry their Sanskrit grammar with them.⁵ Editorials, legal texts, academic prose and much poetry sit in that register, and reading them fluently requires a working Sanskrit vocabulary that ordinary conversation never demands. This is the single largest gap between spoken and written Marathi.

The second is the saint-poets. The abhanga tradition — Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Tukaram — is the emotional centre of Marathi as a literary language, and its idiom is neither modern colloquial nor tatsama but a thirteenth-to-seventeenth-century Marathi with its own vocabulary and syntax. Marathi speakers quote it constantly. A learner who can follow an abhanga has crossed into the culture rather than merely the language.

The third is code-switching. Urban Marathi, especially in Mumbai, moves between Marathi, Hindi and English several times per sentence, and the switch points are not random — they carry register, irony, class and intimacy. A speaker who produces uniformly pure Marathi in a Mumbai office sounds as odd as one who cannot produce it at all.

An honest note on the ceiling. This guide gives you the script, the sound system, the case and gender machinery, the ergative, and 509 audited words. It cannot give you the tatsama vocabulary or the switching intuitions, both of which take years. What it can do is get you past the point where the past tense collapses — which is where most learners of Marathi stop.

14. Where this guide's facts come from

Speaker figures, status, the typological summary and the dialect and community notes come from Ethnologue, with classification from Glottolog.¹² The grammar — the three genders and the noun classes, the derivation of feminines, the oblique stem, the eight vibhaktī, the adjective classes, the demonstrative and possessive paradigms, the pronoun table with the inclusive/exclusive contrast, the copula, the imperative and causative patterns, split ergativity, differential object marking and the three prayoga — is taken from the English Wikipedia article on Marathi grammar, retrieved 4 August 2026, with the scholarly attributions that article itself gives: Dhongde and Wali on the case analysis,⁶ Pandharipande on the locative contrast and the ergative environments,⁷ Wali on neutral agreement,⁸ Legate on the aspectual basis of the split,⁹ Beck, Butt and Deo on differential object marking,¹⁰ Bobaljik on the competing -ला analysis,¹¹ and Dryer's WALS datapoint for the word order.¹² Carey's 1805 grammar is cited as the first of its kind.⁵ The script section draws on the Wikipedia article on the Marathi language.⁴ The Classical Language designation is reported from the in-repo research dossier, which flags it as unverified.³

Known limits. The 83-million L1 figure is from the 2011 census and the 12.2-million L2 figure from 2001 — an inconsistency inherited from Ethnologue and flagged here rather than smoothed over. The phonology section is a practical orientation, not a full phonemic analysis; Marathi's schwa-deletion rules in particular are more complex than described. The dialect table is indicative and the boundary between Malvani and Konkani is contested. The four graded readers are constructed teaching texts, not attested literature; the sentences in sections 8 and 9 are the only quoted examples. And no part of this guide has yet been reviewed by a fluent Marathi speaker; corrections are welcome.