ABOUT THE CUTCHI TUTOR

Cutchi can claim to be older than Sanskrit. It belongs to the ancient group of Prakrit languages, the fore runners of Sanskrit. They were the spoken languages of the common people. Sindhi was the language of the people south of Persia reaching up to the banks of River Sindhu (Indus). Cutchi is a variant of Sindhi differing only in intonation of certain words and vocabulary added later from Urdu and Gujarati owing to the Sindhi migration to Urdu and Gujarati speaking areas. In spite of the fact that Cutchi has been influenced by various local languages it is uniformly understood by most Cutchi and Sindhi speakers. Whether Sindhi or Cutchi had a script of its own is unknown, though it is said that the Bhuj museum, had some specimens of writings on rocks in Cutchi. Having migrated to Gujarat the Cutchi Memons had resorted to using Gujarati or Sindhi as the medium for education and commerce, so much so, Cutchi remained scriptless.  Muslims used modified Arabic Script and others either Devanagari or Gujarati. A set of Sindhi characters is given in the following table along side their equivalents in other scripts.