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What is Sanskrit? India's classical language, explained

Sanskrit is the classical language of ancient India, the language of the Vedas and of Panini's grammar, and a sister of Latin and Greek rather than their mother.

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Sanskrit is the classical language of ancient India, a member of the Indo-European family that also includes Latin, Greek and English. Its oldest form is the language of the Rigveda, composed more than 3,000 years ago, and for some two thousand years it was the language of South Asian religion, philosophy, science and poetry. Almost no one speaks it from birth today, but it is still recited, studied and written.

In short

  • Sanskrit comes in two main stages: Vedic, the language of the oldest Hindu hymns, and Classical, the form fixed by the grammarian Panini.
  • Its close match with Latin and Greek led European scholars, from 1786, to the idea of the Indo-European language family.
  • It is a sister of those languages, not their ancestor, and it is unrelated to many languages of India itself.

What kind of language is Sanskrit?

Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, the branch that also produced Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi. The name, saṃskṛta, joins sam "together, well" and kṛta "made": it means something like "refined" or "well put together". It was set against the Prakrits, the "natural" everyday languages that developed alongside it and from which the modern languages of north India descend.

Two stages matter. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, Hinduism's oldest scriptures. The earliest, the Rigveda, is a collection of 1,028 hymns that scholars date to roughly 1500 to 1200 BC. It was not written down for many centuries. Priests passed it on by memory, using recitation methods so strict that the text survives without variant readings, as Wikipedia's account of the language sets out. Classical Sanskrit is the later, standardized form, the language of the epics, of drama and of learned writing, and its standard was set by one book.

Why is Panini's grammar so famous?

Panini was a grammarian from the northwest of the subcontinent, usually dated to about the 4th century BC, though some scholars place him in the 6th century BC or earlier. His Aṣṭādhyāyī, "eight chapters", describes Sanskrit in nearly 4,000 short rules called sutras (counts give 3,959 or 3,996, depending on the edition). It is one of the first complete, rule-based descriptions of any language, and the oldest Sanskrit grammar that survives whole.

What makes it remarkable is how it works. The rules are compressed like a formula, and applying them in order to a list of roots and endings generates every correct word form. Some rules are about other rules, saying which one wins when two apply at once. When European scholars read it in the 19th century, it shaped modern linguistics: Ferdinand de Saussure and Leonard Bloomfield, two founders of the field, both drew on it. Computer scientists now compare its rule system to the grammars used to define programming languages.

How did Sanskrit reveal the Indo-European family?

On 2 February 1786, the British judge and scholar William Jones gave a lecture to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He said Sanskrit bore to Greek and Latin "a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident", so strong "that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists." Others had noticed resemblances before him, but his statement is usually taken as the starting point of comparative linguistics and of the idea of a language family.

The evidence is easy to see in basic words, the kind least likely to be borrowed:

English Sanskrit Latin Greek
mother mātṛ māter mḗtēr
father pitṛ pater patḗr
brother bhrātṛ frāter phrā́tēr (clansman)
three trayas trēs treîs
ten daśa decem déka
foot pad- ped- pod-
name nāman nōmen ónoma

Read the table step by step and a pattern appears that chance cannot explain. Where Sanskrit, Latin and Greek have p, English has f: pitṛ, pater, father; pad-, ped-, foot. Where they have d, English has t: daśa, decem, ten; and again in foot. Where Sanskrit has bh, Latin has f and English b: bhrātṛ, frāter, brother. These are regular sound correspondences: each language changed the sounds of the shared parent in its own consistent way. The English and Germanic shifts were later worked out as Grimm's law. Matching sounds in this regular way, not just similar-looking words, is how linguists prove that languages are related.

What was Sanskrit used for?

For about two thousand years, Sanskrit was the shared written language of learning across South Asia and beyond, much as Latin was in Europe. The Vedas and Upanishads, the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana and the Bhagavad Gita, central texts of Hinduism, are in Sanskrit. So are many Mahayana Buddhist scriptures, while the Theravada Buddhist canon is in Pali, a Prakrit. The Jain canon is in another Prakrit, but later Jain thinkers wrote widely in Sanskrit too.

It was also a language of science and literature. The playwright Kalidasa wrote in it, and so did India's mathematicians and astronomers. Brahmagupta's rules for calculating with zero, written in 628, are in Sanskrit, and the word "zero" itself traces back to the Sanskrit śūnya, "empty", as the note on who invented zero follows. Sanskrit inscriptions spread through Southeast Asia, in what are now Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia, and Buddhist texts carried Sanskrit words into Chinese and Tibetan.

Sanskrit has no script of its own. It has been written in Brahmi and its many descendants, regional scripts across India, and in Devanagari, the script most used for it today. English has borrowed from it too: yoga, karma, mantra, guru and avatar.

Is Sanskrit still spoken today?

Hardly anyone grows up speaking Sanskrit, and scholars generally say it has no known native speakers. Yet in India's census, some people still name it as their mother tongue: 14,135 in 2001 and 24,821 in 2011, according to the 2011 figures as reported in 2018. That is about 0.002% of the population. Researchers read these answers as a statement of identity and attachment to the language more than of daily use; a 2022 study of the census returns found them mostly urban and concentrated in the Hindi-speaking north.

It has official standing all the same. Sanskrit is one of the 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule of India's Constitution, and two states made it a second official language: Uttarakhand in 2010 and Himachal Pradesh in 2019. It is taught in many schools and universities, used daily in Hindu worship and in some Buddhist monasteries, and still written by scholars and poets.

Is Sanskrit the mother of all languages?

No. This is the most common claim about Sanskrit, and the evidence runs against it. Sanskrit, Latin and Greek are sisters: each descends from an older, unwritten language that linguists call Proto-Indo-European and reconstruct from the correspondences shown above. Jones himself said the common source "perhaps, no longer exists", and the shared features are explained by that lost parent, not by Sanskrit giving birth to the others. Hittite, another Indo-European language, is even written down earlier than any Sanskrit text.

Most of the world's languages are not related to Sanskrit at all. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam belong to the Dravidian family, and Chinese, Arabic and Japanese to other families again. Tamil and its neighbors borrowed many Sanskrit words, but borrowing words is not descent: English borrowed thousands of French words and is still a Germanic language. Even Hindi and Bengali come from Sanskrit only indirectly, through the spoken Prakrits. What Sanskrit is, is an early, richly recorded member of one large family, and its age and its grammar are reason enough for its fame. How languages arise in the first place is the subject of what language is.

Check yourself

  • Close the page and explain how comparing pitṛ, pater and father shows that languages are related.
  • What is the difference between Vedic and Classical Sanskrit, and what part did Panini play?
  • Why is it wrong to call Sanskrit the mother of Latin and Greek?

Sources

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