The western and central districts of Rajasthan speak the Rajasthani group of Indo-Aryan dialects — Marwari, Mewari, Dhundhari, Shekhawati and Hadoti among them. Hindi is the language of administration, schooling and print, so the everyday dialect map coexists with a literary and official language that many villagers read with difficulty. The gap is not between two languages so much as between a spoken register and a written one.
The dialects are not dialects of Hindi in the ordinary sense of mutual intelligibility: Marwari and Mewari differ from each other about as much as they differ from standard Hindi, and none of them has had an official state boundary drawn around it. Rajasthani has no status in the Eighth Schedule. Political movements to obtain it have been running since the 1950s under several organisations, and the demand has periodically been a live one in state politics without ever being conceded.
Urban migration and schooling are slowly eroding the dialect map, but the forms persist in domestic life, folk performance and markets. Marriage and trade networks often run along the same linguistic lines, which makes language a quiet marker of region and community rather than only of state. A Marwari speaker from Jodhpur and a Mewari speaker from Udaipur are both counted in the census as Hindi speakers, and both would find that description incomplete.
