Gujarati Language - Demographics and Distribution

Demographics and Distribution

Of the approximately 46 million speakers of Gujarati in 1997, roughly 45.5 million resided in India, 150,000 in Uganda, 250,000 in Tanzania, 50,000 in Kenya and roughly 100,000 in Pakistan. There are now 65.5 million Gujarati speakers.

There is a large Gujarati community in Mumbai, India (2.1 million). A considerable Gujarati-speaking population, approaching one million, exists in North America, most particularly in the New York City Metropolitan Area and in the Greater Toronto Area (both of which have over 100,000 speakers), but also throughout the major metropolitan areas of the United States and Canada. According to the 2011 census, Gujarati is the seventeenth most spoken language in the Greater Toronto Area. The United Kingdom has 300,000 speakers, many of them situated in the London areas of Wembley, Harrow, Newham and Redbridge, and in Leicester, Coventry, Bradford and the former mill towns of Lancashire. A portion of these numbers consists of East African Gujaratis who, under increasing discrimination and policies of Africanisation in their newly independent resident countries (especially Uganda, where Idi Amin expelled 50,000 Asians), were left with uncertain futures and citizenships. Most, with British passports, settled in the UK.

Indeed, due to the large Gujarati diaspora in the UK, Gujarati is offered as a GCSE subject for students in the United Kingdom.

Besides being spoken by the Gujarati people, non-Gujarati residents of and migrants to the state of Gujarat also count as speakers, among them the Kutchis (as a literary language), the Parsis (adopted as a mother tongue), and Hindu Sindhi refugees from Pakistan.