Sanskrit

Sanskrit is the classical Old Indo-Aryan language of South Asia and the sacred tongue of Hinduism, as well as a language of Buddhist and Jain learning. Its oldest layer is Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the Rigveda, whose hymns were composed between 1500 and 1200 BC and preserved by oral tradition.

In the mid-first millennium BC the grammarian Panini codified Classical Sanskrit in his Eight Chapters, after which the language changed little. It had no script of its own, being written in Brahmi and later most often in Devanagari; from the fourth century its inscriptions reached Southeast Asia, where Brahmic letters fathered the Khmer and Javanese scripts.

Long after ceasing to be a mother tongue, Sanskrit remained the link language of religion, scholarship and courts, and the Benares Sanskrit College, founded under British rule in 1791, sustained its traditional teaching.