Overview
Sanskrit (संस्कृतम्, saṃskṛtam) is a classical language of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It developed in South Asia after its predecessor languages spread into the region from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the medium of classical Hindu philosophy, and the language of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism.
In ancient and medieval South Asia, Sanskrit functioned as a link language. With the transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion, high culture and political elites in several of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting influence on the formal and learned vocabularies of languages across South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia.
The term Sanskrit broadly covers several Old Indo-Aryan varieties. The most archaic is Vedic Sanskrit, found in the Rigveda, a collection of 1,028 hymns composed by Indo-Aryan tribes who migrated eastward from the mountains of present-day northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the existing languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals, while the ancient Dravidian languages influenced its phonology and syntax.
More narrowly, Sanskrit refers to Classical Sanskrit, a refined and standardised grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE. It was codified in the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight Chapters') of Pāṇini, the most comprehensive of ancient grammars. The dramatist Kālidāsa, regarded as a leading literary figure in the language, wrote in Classical Sanskrit, and early foundations of arithmetic were first described in this register. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers.
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