Sanskrit

Sanskrit
संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam
The word Sanskrit (संस्कृतम्) written in Devanagari.
Region	South Asia
Native speakers	14,000[1] (2001)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Sanskrit
Writing system	No native script.[2] Today it is usually written in Devanagari, but it was also previously written in various Brāhmī-based scripts.
Official status
Official language in	One of the 22 scheduled languages of 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 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
Related
Official languages of India Languages with official status in India

Sanskrit is an ancient Indo-Aryan language that originated in the Swat and northern Punjab regions of Pakistan.^[3][4] It is considered sacred by Hindus. Many languages in Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh are derived from Sanskrit.^[5] Today, only about 14,000 people use it as their daily language.^[1] It is also one of the 22 officially recognised languages of India.

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 South Asia during the early 2nd millennium BC and brought the Indo-European language Sanskrit with them.^[6] The main script used to write Sanskrit today is Devanāgarī. Historically, it was also written in the Kharoshti and Brahmic scripts.^[7]

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.^[source?]

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} "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.
2. ↑ 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]}
3. ↑ Bronkhorst, Johannes (2010). Franco, Eli; Monika, Zin (eds.). "The spread of Sanskrit". From Turfan to Ajanta. Festschrift for Dieter Schlingloff on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday. Lumbini International Research Institute: 117–139 – via University of Lausanne.
4. ↑ mushtaq-soofi (2013-02-15). "Language: Sanskrit and Prakrits!". DAWN.COM. Retrieved 2024-02-01.
5. ↑ "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.
6. ↑ Witzel, Michael 2005. Indocentrism. In Bryant, Edwin & Patton, Laurie L. The Indo-Aryan controversy: evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.
7. ↑ 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.