Sanskrit

Sanskrit
Sanskrit
संस्कृतम् ; saṃskṛtam
	The word Sanskrit (संस्कृतम्) written in Devanagari.
Region	South Asia
Native speakers	14,000 (2001)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Sanskrit; ; ;
Writing system	No native script.; Today it is usually written in Devanagari, but it was also previously written in various Brāhmī-based scripts.
Official status
Official language in	India
Language codes
ISO 639-1	sa
ISO 639-2	san
ISO 639-3	san

Sanskrit (संस्कृत) is an ancient Indo-European language. Many languages in the Indian subcontinent today are derived from Sanskrit.^[3] Today, only about 14,000 people use it as their daily language.^[1]

Part of a series on

Constitutionally recognised languages of India

Category

Scheduled Languages

A
Assamese
B
Bengali
Bodo
D
Dogri
G
Gujarati
H
Hindi
K
Kannada
Kashmiri
Konkani
M
Maithili
Malayalam
Marathi
Meitei (Manipuri)
N
Nepali
O
Odia (Oriya)
P
Punjabi
S
Sanskrit
Santali
Sindhi
T
Tamil
Telugu
U
Urdu

A Sanskrit script

Sanskrit is a standardized dialect of Old Indo-Aryan and has a linguistic ancestry that can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European. The Indo-European Aryan migration theory proposes that the Indo-Europeans migrated from the Central Asian steppes into the Indian subcontinent during the early 2nd millennium BC and brought the Indo-European language Sanskrit with them.^[4] The main script used to write Sanskrit today is Devanāgarī. Historically, it was also written in the Kharoshti and Brahmic scripts.^[5]

William Jones, working as a judge in India in the 18th century, studied Sanskrit and recognised its similarities to Latin, Greek and other European languages. That led to the Indo-European languages being recognised as a group of related languages stretching from Europe to India.

It is also one of the 22 officially recognised languages of India.

Literature

Sanskrit literature includes poetry and drama and has also scientific, technical, philosophical and religious texts.^[6]^[7] Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a sacred language in Hindu religious rituals, and also some Buddhist and Jain practice in the form of hymns and chants.

Grammar

Sanskrit has a very complex grammar, with eight grammatical cases, three grammatical genders, and three grammatical numbers. Words are also described based on their qualities. Sanskrit is considered highly scientific, words in a sentence can describe the subject's number, gender and action.

Sanskrit Media

Rigveda (padapatha) manuscript in Devanagari, early 19th century. The red horizontal and vertical lines mark low and high pitch changes for chanting.
A 17th-century birch bark manuscript of Pāṇini's grammar treatise from Kashmir
The Spitzer Manuscript is dated to about the 2nd century CE (above: folio 383 fragment). Discovered in the Kizil Caves, near the northern branch of the Central Asian Silk Route in northwest China, it is the oldest Sanskrit philosophical manuscript known so far.
Sanskrit language's historical presence has been attested in many countries. The evidence includes manuscript pages and inscriptions discovered in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. These have been dated between 300 and 1800 CE.
Sanskrit in modern Indian and other Brahmi scripts: May Śiva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods. (Kālidāsa)
One of the earliest known Sanskrit inscriptions in Tamil Grantha script at a rock-cut Hindu Trimurti temple (Mandakapattu, c. 615 CE)
The ancient Yūpa inscription (one of the earliest and oldest Sanskrit texts written in ancient Indonesia) dating back to the 4th century CE written by Brahmins under the rule of King Mulavarman of the Kutai Martadipura Kingdom located in eastern Borneo