The classical liturgical and literary language of the Indian subcontinent — the language of the Vedas, the Mahabharata, and a millennia-spanning tradition of grammar and poetics.
Where it was spoken
Vedic Sanskrit, the oldest attested form, was the language of the Rigveda composed around 1500–1200 BCE. Classical Sanskrit — codified by Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī around the 4th century BCE — served as the literary, scholarly, and ritual register across the Indian subcontinent and into Southeast Asia for two thousand years.
What it sounded like
Sanskrit’s eight cases, three numbers, ten classes of verb roots, and a system of internal sandhi (sound changes at word boundaries) make it one of the most elaborately inflected Indo-European languages. Vowel length and aspiration of consonants are both phonemic.
How it’s written
No single script — Sanskrit has been written in Brahmi, Devanagari, Sharada, Grantha, Bengali, Tamil, and others, depending on region. It remains a scheduled language of India and is still used in Hindu ritual.
Find more languages by letter
Sanskrit starts with S and ends with T. Browse other languages along the same letter.
Languages that contain a letter from "Sanskrit":