The language is spoken by Saurashtrans who mostly live in Tamil Nadu and belong to a cast of
weavers. According to their oral tradition they stem from Saurashtra and left their home when
it was conquered by Muslims. They immigrated into Tamil Nadu by way of Maharashtra and
Andhraradesh. The Saurashtra language is one of Indo-Aryan languages as Hindi Gujarati etc.
are. However as the Saurashtrans live in the Dravidian linguistic area their language has
become almost Dravidian in grammatical structure though its basic vocabulary is still
Indo-Aryan. The language has many loanwords from Marathi Telugu and Tamil which supports the
evidence of their oral tradition. This dictionary the first modern lexicography of the
Saurashtra language contains a short grammar and a vocabulary of the Bangalore dialect of the
same language.
