Sanskrit

Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwestern South Asia, deriving from Indo-Aryan languages that diffused from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism and classical Hindu philosophy and religion and the liturgical language of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a lingua franca in ancient and medieval South Asia, and, as Hindu and Buddhist culture spread to Southeast East and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion, high culture and the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting effect on the languages of South, Southeast and parts of Eastern Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.

Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rigveda, a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from the mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit, a refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini. The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa, wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language.