Sanskrit

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]

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	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

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. ^[source?]

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.