Memoni (also written Memni, and sometimes described as a dialect of Sindhi) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Kathiawari Memon community, a Sunni Muslim group whose roots trace back to the Indian subcontinent. It is spoken mainly in the Kathiawar region of Gujarat in India and in Sindh in Pakistan, as well as by Memon diaspora communities in Sri Lanka, South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, the Middle East, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Memoni originated as a north-western Indo-Aryan vernacular that evolved from a distinct blend of Sindhi and Kutchi, heavily influenced by centuries of geographical migration and trade. Unlike Sindhi and Kutchi, which are spoken across various religious groups, Memoni is traditionally an unwritten language spoken by the Kathiawari Memon community.

Estimates of the number of speakers vary; the total is usually put at between two and three million, and the language is generally described as endangered.

Origins: the migration route from Sindh to Gujarat

The linguistic roots of Memoni are directly tied to the history of the Memon people.

• The Sindh roots. The community traces its lineage back to the Lohana caste of Sindh, in what is now Pakistan, who converted to Islam in the 15th century.
• The move to Kathiawar. Following their conversion, a large group migrated south to the Kutch and Kathiawar regions of Gujarat, India.
• Linguistic isolation. Settled in Gujarat and separated from their original Sindhi-speaking homeland, their speech began to diverge. While it kept the core stress, intonation and grammatical structure of Sindhi, it absorbed substantial elements of the surrounding local languages.

According to community tradition, the Lohanas were converted by the Sufi saint Yusufuddin Gilani, a descendant of Abdul Qadir Gilani, and the name Memon comes from the Arabic Mu'min (مؤمن), meaning "believer". After leaving Thatta in Sindh, the community dispersed across Sindh and Gujarat, settling in particular in Kathiawar by around the 1460s. Memoni is generally thought to have developed from a dialect of Sindhi that the Memons carried with them from Sindh into Gujarat, and it has been spoken in Kathiawar for roughly five centuries since.

A hybrid vocabulary

Because the Memon people were historically a prominent mercantile and trading community, their language naturally acted like a sponge, absorbing vocabulary from regional and international trade hubs. Linguistically it is classified as a mixture of:

• Sindhi and Kutchi — forming the grammatical baseline, the sentence structure (subject-object-verb) and the everyday speech rhythm.
• Gujarati — borrowed extensively for the daily lexicon through centuries of living in the Kathiawar peninsula.
• Hindustani (Urdu and Hindi) and Arabic — heavily integrated through religious ties and Islamic literature. This became even more pronounced for the large population of Memons who migrated to Karachi and other parts of Sindh in Pakistan after the 1947 partition.
• English — in modern times, global business exposure has introduced many English loanwords into everyday Memoni.

Memoni is often described as mutually intelligible with Kutchi, and it shares a great deal of vocabulary with Gujarati, although it is only distantly related to it. Because the community has historically been multilingual, many speakers move between Memoni, Sindhi, Gujarati, Kutchi, Urdu and English in everyday life.

Dialects and internal variation

Because Memoni was traditionally an oral, unwritten language, it developed slight internal variations. Different villages or family enclaves in Kathiawar developed distinct accents and vocabulary choices; for instance, the word for sugar varies between khand and chinni depending on the ancestral village.

Varieties are usually named after the towns the community came from. Kathiawari Memon families trace themselves to places including Bantva, Kutiyanah, Dhoraji, Jetpur, Gondal, Vanthli, Veraval, Jamnagar, Junagadh, Porbandar, Halari and Upleta.

The Memon community as a whole is divided into Kathiawari Memons, Kutchi Memons, Bantva Memons and Sindhi Memons. The Kathiawari and Bantva Memons are the groups most closely associated with the language.

Script

Memoni has never had a single standard script. It has been written in Arabic script, Sindhi Naskh, Urdu Nastaliq and Gujarati script, and today it is most often written informally in Roman letters, sometimes called Roman Memon.

Because writing conventions are not standardised, spellings of the same word can vary considerably between towns, families and generations. This is one reason that recording a shared written form of the language is a priority for community projects.

Current status

Today Memoni is considered an endangered language. As the global Memon diaspora has spread across Pakistan, India, the United Kingdom, South Africa and North America, younger generations are increasingly assimilating into dominant regional languages such as Urdu and English.

Memons were historically a mercantile community, and from the 18th and 19th centuries they established trading networks reaching from Central Africa to China, with communities growing in South Africa, Sri Lanka, East Asia and the Middle East. The partition of India in 1947 scattered the community further. Many Memons of the Kathiawar region moved to other parts of India, while a large number settled in Pakistan and in Sri Lanka, South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, the United States and Canada. Dispersion, marriages across language groups, and the dominance of national languages in schools and business have all contributed to the decline in everyday use of Memoni.

Preservation

Interest in documenting and teaching Memoni has grown, both inside the community and beyond it. Community organisations such as the World Memon Organisation support cultural and educational projects, and the language is listed among the world's endangered languages.

Memonpedia was created by members of the community to record Memoni words, phrases, poetry and stories, and to give the language a written presence that anyone can search, read and contribute to.

How to help

This article is editable. Registered members are encouraged to add corrections, sources and detail, especially about the history of individual towns, families and dialects.

If you add information, please say where it comes from and write it in your own words.