Sanskrit
| Sanskrit | |
|---|---|
| संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam | |
_in_Sanskrit.svg) The word Sanskrit (संस्कृतम्) written in Devanagari. | |
| Region | South Asia |
Native speakers | (14,000 cited 2001) |
Indo-European
| |
| 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 |
| Part of a series on | |
|---|---|
| |
| Constitutionally recognised languages of India | |
| Category | |
| Scheduled Languages | |
|
A
| |
| Related | |
|
Official languages of India
|
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Sanskrit (संस्कृत) is an ancient Indo-European language. Many languages in the Indian subcontinent today are derived from Sanskrit. Today, only about 14,000 people use it as their daily language.
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. The main script used to write Sanskrit today is Devanāgarī. Historically, it was also written in the Kharoshti and Brahmic scripts.
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. [source?]
Literature
Sanskrit literature includes poetry and drama and has also scientific, technical, philosophical and religious texts. 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.
References
- 1 2 "Comparative speaker's strength of scheduled languages − 1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001". Census of India, 2001. Office of the Registrar and Census Commissioner, India. Retrieved 31 December 2009.
- ↑ Banerji, Suresh (1971). A companion to Sanskrit literature: spanning a period of over three thousand years, containing brief accounts of authors, works, characters, technical terms, geographical names, myths, legends, and twelve appendices. p. 672. ISBN 978-81-208-0063-2.[permanent dead link]
- ↑ "Sanskrit is second official language in Uttarakhand – The Hindustan Times". Hindustantimes.com. 19 January 2010. Archived from the original on 2011-11-02. Retrieved 2012-04-05.
- ↑ Witzel, Michael 2005. Indocentrism. In Bryant, Edwin & Patton, Laurie L. The Indo-Aryan controversy: evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.
- ↑ Brown, W. Norman (1953). "Script Reform in Modern India, Pakistan, and Ceylon". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 73 (1): 1–6. doi:10.2307/595755. ISSN 0003-0279. JSTOR 595755.
- ↑ Katju, Markandey (9 June 2014). "Sanskrit as a language of science". The Times of India.
- ↑ Katju, Markandey (5 December 2011). "Markandey Katju: What is India?". The Times of India.
