As explained in the article INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES, there were in ancient times two main groups of these forms of speech--one, the language of the Midland, spoken in the country near the Gangetic Doab, and the other, the languages of the so-called "Outer Band," containing the Midland on three sides, west, east and south. The country to the south of the Midland, in which members of this Outer group of languages were formerly spoken, included the modern Rajputana and Gujarat, and extended to the basin of the river Nerbudda, being bounded on the south by the Vindhya hills. In the course of time the population of the Midland expanded, and gradually occupied this tract, reaching the sea in Gujarat. The language of the Outer Band was thus forced farther afield. Its speakers crossed the Vindhyas and settled in the central plateau of the Deccan and on the Konkan coast. Here they came into contact with speakers of the Dravidian languages of southern India. As happened elsewhere in India, they retained their own Aryan tongue, and gradually through the influence of their superior civilization imposed it upon the aborigines, so that all the inhabitants of this tract became the ancestors of the speakers of modern Marathi. In Rajputana and Gujarat the language (see GUJARAT) is to a certain extent mixed. Near the original Midland there are few traces of the Outer language, but as we go farther and farther away from that centre we find, as might be expected, the influence of the Midland language becoming weaker and weaker, and traces of the Outer language becoming more and more evident, until in Gujarati we recognize several important survivals of the old language once spoken by the earlier Aryan inhabitants. _Dialects._--Besides the standard form of speech, there is only one real dialect of Marathi, viz. Konkani (Konkani), spoken in the country near Goa. There are also several local varieties, and we may conveniently distinguish between the Marathi of the Deccan, that of the Central Provinces (including Berar), and that of the northern and central Konkan. In the southern part of the district of Ratnagiri this latter Konkani variety of Marathi gradually merges into the true Konkani dialect through a number of intermediate forms of speech. There are also several broken jargones, based upon Marathi, employed by aboriginal tribes surviving in the hill country.