Gujarati or English: which should your brand write in?

Most Ahmedabad brands answer this by defaulting to English, then translating a few things for “reach”. It is the worst of the three options, and it is the most common.

Where Gujarati wins, clearly

• Anything physical in a Gujarati-speaking town. Bags, boards, print, the sheet that comes with the newspaper. The reader is not choosing to read you; they are walking past you. Nobody translates in their head while walking past.
• Anything sent on WhatsApp to a customer. WhatsApp is where people speak the way they speak at home.
• Anything about money, health or family. These are the subjects people think in their first language, whatever language they work in.
• Anything meant to be funny. A joke has to land in the language the reader dreams in, or it lands a half-second late, which is the same as not landing.

Where English still wins

• LinkedIn, and anything business-to-business. The buyer is reading at work, in the language their industry writes in.
• A national or export audience. A D2C brand shipping to Pune and Kochi is not a Gujarati brand, whatever the founder's mother tongue.
• Technical or legal writing. The vocabulary exists in Gujarati, but your reader looks the terms up in English anyway.

The mistake: translating instead of writing

Translated copy is detectable in one line. It has English sentence shapes wearing Gujarati words: long clauses, a passive verb, a formal register nobody speaks in. It reads as though the company is talking to you from behind a counter, in a shirt.

Here is a small example from our own work. For an investment company's bags we wrote:

રોકાણ ફાફડા. વીમો જલેબી.
દશેરાએ એકલું કોણ ખાય?

Investment is fafda. Insurance is jalebi. Who eats one without the other on Dussehra?

You cannot reach that line from English. It is not a translation of “investment and insurance work best together”; it is what happens when someone thinks about the pairing in Gujarati, in a Gujarati month, standing near a shop that sells both. Translate it back and it dies. That is the test for whether a line was actually written in the language.

If the English version is the original, the Gujarati will always sound like a form. If the Gujarati is the original, the English sounds like a translation, and that's fine, because the Gujarati is the one on the bag.

The third option: both, written separately

Not one translated into the other. Two originals, from the same brief, with the same intention and different jokes. It costs more than translation and less than you think, because the thinking is already done; only the writing happens twice.

For a client in Rajula we wrote a whole fortnightly paper concept this way: the sections, the names, the cartoon uncle, all thought out in Gujarati from the beginning, because the reader is a farmer, a shopkeeper, a grandmother, a college student. The case study has the whole thing.

What about the mix?

Gujarati words in an English sentence, or the reverse, is how most of Ahmedabad actually speaks, and on Instagram it reads as normal rather than clever. Two rules keep it from becoming a costume:

1. Only use words your reader uses. If a word arrives from a dictionary rather than from a conversation, cut it.
2. Pick a base language per piece. One language carries the grammar; the other supplies the words. Switching the base mid-caption is where it starts sounding like an ad agency doing an accent.

A quick way to decide

Ask where the reader is when they meet this sentence. Walking past a shop, sitting on a bus, scrolling in bed: Gujarati. At a desk, on a laptop, deciding whether to spend company money: English. Deciding what to do about their family's money: Gujarati, even if they work in English all day.

We write both, and we have opinions about which one your particular sentence should be in. That's the service, and it is the same price either way.