Languages
Sanskrit
sahm-SKRI-tuhm
Also Known As Samskrta / Samskrtam
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Sanskrit is the classical language of ancient India, the liturgical language of Hinduism, and the language of Panini's grammar, one of the earliest and most systematic grammatical descriptions of any language in the world. Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the Rigveda and the other Vedas, is its oldest attested form; Classical Sanskrit, codified by Panini's Ashtadhyayi, standardized the language for the vast literature that followed, including the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana. Sanskrit has no substantial population of native speakers today but remains in active liturgical, scholarly and ceremonial use, and is written primarily in the Devanagari script, though historically in several regional scripts as well.
Facts
ISO 639-3 Code Speaker CountNo native speakers; several thousand people report Sanskrit as a mother tongue in Indian censuses, thought to reflect a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language rather than genuine native use. It functions today as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants and is widely taught at the secondary-school level. StatusLiturgical / Learned Use Only 1 Attested From (Year)Approximate date for the earliest Vedic Sanskrit composition, the Rigveda, per mainstream Indological dating; the exact date is not independently fixed and is itself debated within a range of a few centuries. RegionSouth Asia (ancient and medieval); parts of Southeast Asia (medieval) 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Held Differently
Prakrit, Languages Why this is disputed. A genuinely contested point: the Prakrit grammarians' own traditional view holds the Prakrits are secondary derivations of Sanskrit, while most modern linguists instead treat Prakrit as an independent vernacular continuation of spoken Old Indo-Aryan running parallel to literary Sanskrit rather than descended from it.
Associated With
This source names Sanskrit directly: "The Ashtadhyayi is Panini's grammar of Sanskrit, composed in roughly four thousand algebraic-style rules organized in eight chapters."
This source names Sanskrit directly: "where Hindi draws vocabulary from Sanskrit and Urdu from Persian and Arabic, and in script, Devanagari against the Perso-Arabic alphabet; whether Hindi and Urdu are one spoken language with two..."
This source names Sanskrit directly: "Panini was a Sanskrit grammarian of ancient India whose Ashtadhyayi, roughly four thousand rules organized with an almost algebraic economy across eight chapters, is the earliest surviving complete..."
This source names Sanskrit directly: "1786, this address observed that Sanskrit bears to Greek and Latin a resemblance too strong to be accidental, in both grammatical structure and root vocabulary, and proposed that all three, along..."
This source names Sanskrit directly: "His study of Sanskrit alongside his existing knowledge of Greek and Latin led him to argue, in a 1786 address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, that the three languages shared a common ancestor no..."
In Family
Written In
Brahmi, Scripts Ashoka's own third-century BCE edicts are in Prakrit rather than Sanskrit; Brahmi came to be used extensively for Sanskrit in the centuries that followed. An entity request is filed for Prakrit as the more precise original target.
Sources
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