Short answers, pulled from the story.
Marathi had 83 million native speakers according to the 2011 census, making it the third most spoken native language in India after Hindi and Bengali, and fifteenth in the world. It is primarily spoken in Maharashtra and is also spoken in Goa, parts of Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and the union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.
The Government of India approved classical language status for Marathi on the 3rd of October 2024. The application had been submitted to the Ministry of Culture by the Government of Maharashtra.
The earliest attested record of Marathi is a copper-plate inscription from Satara dated to 739 CE. Marathi-only inscriptions appear later, including a stone inscription from Akshi taluka of Raigad district dated to around 1012 CE and a copper-plate inscription from Dive dated 1060 or 1086 CE.
The Vivekasindhu, written by Mukundaraja, a Nath yogi, is considered the oldest book in prose form in Marathi. His second work, Paramamrta, is recognised as the first systematic attempt to explain the Vedanta philosophy in the Marathi language.
Shivaji replaced Persian with Marathi as the language of his court. He also commissioned his official Balaji Avaji Chitnis to compile the Rajavyavaharakosa, a thesaurus replacing Persian and Arabic administrative terms with Sanskrit equivalents, completed in 1677. The Persian share of official Marathi vocabulary fell from about 80% in 1630 to 37% by 1677.
From the 13th century until 1950, Marathi was written in the Modi script for administrative and business purposes, a cursive script designed to minimise lifting the pen while writing. Since 1950 it has been written in the Balbodh variant of Devanagari. Historically, the Kadamba script and its variants were used for stone and copper-plate inscriptions.