Two languages, one parent, and the same words worn down two different ways.
Bhashao, ભાષાઓ, is Gujarati for languages. Hindi and Gujarati are both Indo-Aryan: both come down from Sanskrit through the spoken Prakrits and the Apabhramsha of the late first millennium, Gujarati by the western line it shares with Rajasthani, Hindi by the central line that grew out of Shauraseni. They are two languages, and a Hindi speaker does not understand Gujarati by default. But much of what is said in Ahmedabad is made of words a Hindi speaker already owns, worn a little differently: Sanskrit hasta became हाथ in one house and હાથ in the other, and the same is true of house, water, milk and eye. Bhashao is a map of that kinship and of the layers laid over it. Which words the two inherited together, which they borrowed from the same lender, and which only look alike.
The endings are where a Hindi ear hears the difference, and they follow rules. A Hindi masculine in -aa is a Gujarati masculine in -o, so ghoda is ઘોડો ghodo and kaala is કાળો kaalo. Gujarati also kept the neuter that Hindi lost, marked with a nasal -u: kapda is કપડું kapdu, and paani, masculine in Hindi, is neuter પાણી. Learn those two and a long stretch of the vocabulary stops sounding foreign.
The app
Every entry is a pair, not a translation
A dictionary built the honest way. Each entry holds a Hindi side and a Gujarati side, each with its own script, romanization, origin and gender, plus a plain statement of how the two relate: one Sanskrit word inherited by both and worn down two ways, the same learned Sanskrit word taken whole, the same Persian, Arabic, Portuguese or English loan taken twice, or two different words that happen to mean the same thing. Instant, offline, and it says so when scholars disagree.
Three genders, not two
Both languages assign gender by convention, so a Hindi speaker already knows the game; the difference is the count. Sanskrit had three genders, Hindi merged the neuter away, and Gujarati, like Marathi, kept it: chhokro is a boy, chhokri a girl, chhokru a child. Only the marked endings predict anything. A noun ending in a consonant can be any gender, which is why ghar, doodh and naam are masculine in Hindi and neuter in Gujarati, and why every entry records both sides’ gender rather than copying one across.
Ask Bhashao anything
Beyond the curated set, type any Hindi or Gujarati word and the app looks it up with the same full treatment, then keeps your lookups on the device so an answer you liked is still there next week. The bundled dictionary works with the phone in airplane mode; the lookup is a fallback for what is not in it yet, never a dependency for what is.
Same skeleton, no top line
Gujarati is Nagari with the headline left off, and the two scripts are near twins: take the bar off the top of क and ક is what remains, and the rows run on in the same order. The app puts the two side by side, letter against letter, marks the handful of rows where they part, the retroflex ળ Hindi never uses and the dotted row Gujarati never adopted, and includes a practice mode for learning to read either one.
A word every day, and the essays behind the words
A word of the day drawn from the pair set, with an optional morning notification. And for the bigger picture, a set of essays on how two sister languages came to sound so different, and where the vocabulary they share actually came from. The same essays are published here in full.
A reading guide that marks what the spelling hides
Everyday romanization cannot show everything. Hindi काला and Gujarati કાળો both come out with a plain l, but the Gujarati letter is the retroflex ળ, said with the tongue curled back. So every Gujarati entry carries a second reading, derived mechanically from the script itself. A capital consonant is retroflex, so kaalo reads kaaLo and paani reads paaNi; a capital vowel is the open vowel of a loan spelling, so કૉલેજ reads kOlej; and a final n restores the nasal hum the everyday spelling drops, so kapdu reads kapDun. It also says what it cannot recover: the breathy vowel of બહેન, or the f most speakers give ફ.
No account, no ads, no tracking
The dictionary is bundled in the app and works entirely offline. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing collected, and nothing sent anywhere unless you ask the app a question. Dark mode throughout. It is being built for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mac.
What an entry looks like
Every pair carries both scripts, both romanizations, both origins, the gender on each side where the word has one, and a few plain sentences about how the two words are related. The relation label and the origin colors are the same ones the apps use, so a chip means the same thing here as it does on your phone.
The pair the app is built to show: one Sanskrit word, hasta, worn down to haath in both languages by the same Prakrit stage, where st became tth and the vowel lengthened to make up for it. Neither language borrowed it from the other; both inherited it from a common parent and have said it the same way for the better part of a thousand years. Even the gender agrees here, which it will not always.
Sanskrit paaniya, drinkable, gave both languages the same everyday word for water by the same route. The word is identical; the grammar around it is not. Hindi makes paani masculine, Gujarati makes it neuter, because Gujarati kept the third gender that Sanskrit had and Hindi lost. Expect this mismatch again and again in the most basic vocabulary.
Sanskrit griha lost its cluster and its final vowel in Prakrit and came out as ghar in both languages. Look at the two written forms side by side: घ and ઘ are the same letter with the top line removed, which is the whole story of the Gujarati script in one word. Gujarati ghar is neuter, so it is maaru ghar where Hindi says mera ghar.
A few pairs from the dictionary, in the order the app teaches them. The whole dictionary is in the app, and works offline.
Where the words come from
- Inherited from one parent. Sanskrit hasta became haath in both languages; gṛha became ghar in both; dugdha became doodh in both. The same old sound came out the same way word after word, which is what descent looks like: nobody borrowed anything, the two languages lived through the changes together. These are the words nobody bothers to borrow, hand and house and milk and the numbers, and the app labels them shared inheritance. Marathi and Punjabi usually share them too. Where the tree forks has no date: Gujarati’s nearest sister is Rajasthani, Hindi comes down a different line, and the record shows two paths drifting apart across the Apabhramsha centuries rather than a year in which they parted.
- Sanskrit, taken whole. Both languages also reach back to Sanskrit for their formal register and take the word unchanged: पुस्तक and પુસ્તક pustak, समय and સમય samay. Gujarati’s own grammar sorts these as tatsama, taken as is, against tadbhava, worn down on the way. The one audible difference sits at the end of a word: both drop the final a, but Gujarati keeps it after many Sanskrit clusters, so Hindi mitr is Gujarati mitra and dharm is dharma.
- Persian and Arabic, through the office. Persian was the language of administration in Gujarat from the Delhi Sultanate’s conquest around 1300, through the Gujarat Sultanate and the Mughals, and much of the modern layer came later through Hindustani. So the loans are the ones Hindi has, sarkaar, kharch, bajaar, dost, with one difference on paper: Gujarati never adopted the nuqta letters, so बाज़ार is બજાર with a plain j, and ख़ुशी is ખુશી.
- Portuguese, from the coast. Diu, Daman and Bassein were Portuguese for centuries, and a layer of household words came ashore on both sides: तंबाकू and તમાકુ from tabaco, अनानास and અનાનસ from ananás, and by the standard account the key itself, chaabi and chaavi, from chave. Not every word reached both sisters: Gujarati took the Portuguese batata for the potato, and Hindi named the newcomer aaloo after an older root.
- English, in the last two centuries. Both borrowed heavily, often the same word for the same new thing: स्कूल and સ્કૂલ, डॉक्टर and ડૉક્ટર. Even here the family shows through: school is masculine in Hindi and feminine in Gujarati, and both scripts reached for the same crescent mark to write the open o of doctor.
Three swaps that turn a Hindi word into a Gujarati one. A masculine in -aa ends in -o: ghoda is ઘોડો ghodo, raasta is રસ્તો rasto, and the feminine in -i does not move. The neuter, which Hindi no longer has, ends in a humming -u: kapda is કપડું kapdu, and the infinitive follows the same shape, khaana to ખાવું khaavu. And where Hindi has an l from a single Sanskrit l, Gujarati often has the retroflex ળ: काला and કાળો, फल and ફળ, कमल and કમળ. Do not stretch that last one to काग़ज़ and કાગળ: that ળ answers a Persian z, and how it got there is not settled.
Same skeleton, no top line
Gujarati is Nagari without the shirorekha, the headline that ties a Devanagari word together. By the usual account it grew from a scribes’ and merchants’ hand of the same script and was fixed in its present shape by printing in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though when and where the line first came off is not settled. So the two charts line up row for row, and the exceptions fit on one hand. The rows outlined in saffron are the ones where one script has no counterpart: the five letters Hindi built with a nuqta for Perso-Arabic sounds, the two it built the same way for its own retroflex flaps, and the retroflex ળ that Gujarati writes every day and Hindi never uses. The vowel signs and the conjuncts further down are the same marks in two hands.
The letter by letter chart Show Hide
Vowels13 of 13 line up
Marks3 of 3 line up
Consonants33 of 41 line up
Vowel signs14 of 14 line up
Conjuncts11 of 11 line up
Rows where one script has no counterpart. The full chart, with a note on every row and a practice mode, is in the app.
Get the app
Bhashao is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac. The Android build is a direct download below, as a signed APK rather than a Play Store listing.
The Android build is a direct download, not a Play Store listing. It is signed with Bhashao’s own key; after downloading, run shasum -a 256 Bhashao.apk and compare with 729dd9ddec6393587d80c8e32d6013ad79644c6ac869c4e67214356fbcd417a7. Version 1.1 carries the expanded reviewed dictionary.
From the articles
Sisters, not strangers
Hindi and Gujarati grew from one parent, and much of their core vocabulary is the same word worn down two different ways. So why can a Hindi speaker not simply follow Gujarati? What “sister” means exactly, why it is not the same as borrowing, why no date marks the parting, and how this app labels each pair.
The line that went missing
Take a Devanagari chart, rub out the bar along the top of every letter, and you are most of the way to reading Gujarati. The two scripts match nearly letter for letter, and the exceptions fit on one hand: a retroflex ળ Hindi never uses, a dotted row Gujarati never adopted, two letters for the open vowels of loans, and an r that will not take u the ordinary way. Here is the map, what is and is not known about how the line came off, and a plan for reading ભાષાઓ by the end of a weekend.
Where Hindi says aa, Gujarati says o
To a Hindi ear, Gujarati sounds like Hindi with the endings bent. The bends are regular: a handful of sound rules turn घोड़ा into ઘોડો, खाना into ખાવું and मित्र into મિત્ર, and each can be learned in a minute. Here are seven, including one of the places where the two languages part for good.
All articles →On accuracy
A wrong etymology is far worse than an honest “scholars disagree”. Where a word’s origin is genuinely unsettled, Bhashao says so rather than inventing a tidy story, and popular folk etymologies are debunked rather than repeated.
The harder discipline is refusing a pattern that is not there, and kinship makes that harder, not easier. Hindi kaagaz is Gujarati કાગળ kaagal, and the ળ looks like the regular swap that turns kaala into kaalo. It is not: that letter answers a Persian z, Marathi has kaagad, and how the word landed there is not settled, so the entry says so. The opposite trap is a match that is real but is not inheritance. Hindi dhokla and Gujarati ઢોકળું are the same word because Hindi borrowed it from Gujarati, which is a different fact from haath and હાથ coming down from one Sanskrit word in two houses, and the label says which. And where two sides are the same word and nobody can say where it came from, as with gaadi, the entry says that too.
About the author
Nipun Dubey builds things at the intersection of technology and language. By day he is the CEO & Co-Founder of HappiNest.AI, an AI leasing copilot that helps property managers significantly reduce costs and improve operations for all things leasing. Before HappiNest he led AI and B2B startups bringing transformational change to legacy industries, worked at leading technology companies, and is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Bhashao comes out of the other thread, and the older one: a lifelong fascination with languages and linguistics, history, and cultural anthropology, and a conviction that showing people how much they already share is the fastest way to connect them. It runs in the family. His grandparents grew up in pre-Partition colonial India, and one grandfather, a renowned professor of Hindi and Indian languages, spent his life teaching the very words this project now traces.
Bhashao is the fourth of a set. Zubane covers Hindi and Urdu and argues that two things people think are separate are really one language. Bhashalu and Bhashegalu pair Hindi with Telugu and with Kannada and argue the opposite case: that two genuinely unrelated languages can still trade a great deal of vocabulary. Bhashao makes a third argument, the one in the middle. Two languages, one parent, and the same words worn down two different ways.
Get in touch
hello@bhashao.com. Corrections and counterexamples especially welcome, and from Gujarati speakers doubly so.
