Originating over 5,000 years ago, the linguistic history of India describes the evolution and transformation of early human communications techniques - from pictures, pictorial scripts and engravings - to the modern Indian languages that belong to the Indo-Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages.

Indus script

The term Indus script refers to short strings of symbols associated with the Harappan civilization of ancient India (most of the Indus sites are distributed in present day North West India and Pakistan) used between 2600–1900 BC, which evolved from an early Indus script attested from around 3500–3300 BC. They are most commonly associated with flat, rectangular stone tablets called seals, but they are also found on at least a dozen other materials. The first publication of a Harappan seal dates to 1875, in the form of a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. Since then, well over 4000 symbol-bearing objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. After 1900 BC, use of the symbols ends, together with the final stage of Harappan civilization. Some early scholars, starting with Cunningham in 1877, thought that the script was the archetype of the Brahmi script used by Ashoka. Today Cunningham's claims are rejected by nearly all researchers, but a minority of mostly Indian scholars continues to argue for the Indus script as the predecessor of the Brahmic family. There are over 400 different signs, but many are thought to be slight modifications or combinations of perhaps 200 'basic' signs.

Attempts at decipherment

Over the years, numerous decipherments have been proposed, but none has been accepted by the scientific community at large. The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a successful decipherment:

• The substrate language has not been identified, nor the language family to which it belongs.
• The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being one of only 26 signs.
• No bilingual texts have been found.

The Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola, who has edited a multivolumed corpus of the inscriptions, surmises that the symbols represent a logo-syllabic script, with an underlying Dravidian language as the most likely linguistic substrate.

If the signs are purely ideographical, they may contain no information about the language spoken by their creators, and cannot be called a script in the true sense of the word. A recent paper by Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel - a comparative historian, computational linguist, and Indologist respectively - offers evidence that the symbols were not coupled to oral language, which in part explains the extreme brevity of the inscriptions. For their paper, see the external links.

A number of writers associated with Hindutva have attempted to prove that the script encodes Vedic Sanskrit. R.S. Rajaram and N. Jha made one such claim. D. B. Kasar has compared the Indus script to Germanic runes and claims that IVC inscriptions contain Rigvedic hymns. These theories are not accepted by most scholars.

Indo-Aryan languages

Origins of Sanskrit

The adjective saṃskṛta- means "refined, consecrated, sanctified". The language referred to as saṃskṛtā vāk "the refined language" has by definition always been a 'high' language, used for religious and scientific discourse and contrasted with the languages spoken by the people. The oldest surviving Sanskrit grammar is Pāṇini's Aṣtādhyāyī ("Eight-Chapter Grammar") dating to ca. the 5th century BC. It is essentially a prescriptive grammar, i.e., an authority that defines (rather than describes) correct Sanskrit, although it contains descriptive parts, mostly to account for

When the term arose in India, "Sanskrit" was not thought of as a specific language set apart from other languages (the people of the time regarded languages more as dialects), but rather as a particularly refined or perfected manner of speaking. Knowledge of Sanskrit was a marker of social class and educational attainment and was taught mainly to Brahmins through close analysis of Sanskrit grammarians such as Pāṇini.

Sanskrit is almost a direct descendent of the Proto-Indo-European language. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan sub-family of the Indo-European family of languages. It belongs to the Satem group of Indo-European languages, which also includes the Iranian branch and the Balto-Slavic branch. The categorization may be shown as:

Indo-European → Indo-Iranian → Indo-Aryan (i.e., Sanskrit and its descendents).

Technically, Sanskrit is the oldest of the Old Indo-Aryan languages. Its "daughter languages" include the Prakrits of ancient India, Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Assamese, Nepali, Punjabi and Romany (spoken by the European gypsies). It is no wonder that Sanskrit shows stark similarities—to varying degrees—with Latin, Ancient Greek, Avestan and even Persian and German.

Vedic Sanskrit

Main article: Vedic Sanskrit

Sanskrit, as defined by Pāṇini, had evolved out of the earlier "Vedic" form, and scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or "Paninian" Sanskrit as separate dialects. However, they are extremely similar in many ways and differ mostly in a few points of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Classical Sanskrit can therefore be considered a seamless evolution of the earlier Vedic language. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a large collection of hymns, incantations, and religio-philosophical discussions which form the earliest religious texts in India and the basis for much of the Hindu religion. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, composed by many authors over centuries of oral tradition. The end of the Vedic period is marked by the composition of the Upanishads, which form the concluding part of the Vedic corpus in the traditional compilations. The current hypothesis is that the Vedic form of Sanskrit survived until the middle of the first millennium BC. It is around this time that Sanskrit began the transition from a first language to a second language of religion and learning, marking the beginning of the Classical period.

It is interesting to note that orthodox Hinduism believes that the language of the Vedas is eternal and revealed in its wording and word order. Evidence for this belief is found in the Vedas itself, where in the Upanishads they are described as the very "breath of God" (nihsvasitam brahma). The Vedas are therefore considered "the language of reality", so to speak, and are unauthored, even by God, the rishis or seers ascribed to them being merely individuals gifted with a special insight into reality with the power of perceiving these eternal sounds. At the beginning of every cycle of creation, God himself "remembers" the order of the Vedic words and propagates them through the rishis. Orthodox Hindus, while accepting the linguistic development of Sanskrit as such, do not admit any historical stratification within the Vedic corpus itself.

This belief is of significant consequence in Indian religious history, as the very sacredness and eternality of the language encouraged exact memorization and transmission and discouraged textual learning via written propagation. Each word is believed to have innate and eternal meaning and, when properly pronounced, mystic expressive power.

Erroneous learning of repetition of the Veda was considered a grave sin with potentially immediate negative consequences. Consequently, Vedic learning by rote was encouraged and prized, particularly among Brahmins, where learning of one's own Vedic texts was a mandated duty. On the social side, the need to preserve the error-free nature of the Veda served as a justification to prevent teaching and propagation of the text to those considered "unworthy" of receiving it, by virtue of caste and gender.

Vedic Sanskrit

• Vedic Sanskrit had a voiceless bilabial fricative (/ɸ/, called upamādhamīya) and a voiceless velar fricative (/x/, called jihvāmūlīya)—which used to occure when the breath visarga appeared before labial and velar consonants respectively. Both of them were lost in Classical Sanskrit.
• Vedic Sanskrit had a retroflex lateral approximant (/ɭ/), which was lost in Classical Sanskrit.
• Vedic Sanskrit had a pitch accent which was completely lost sometime around the 6th century ACE (about the same time when Classical Greek also lost its pitch accent)—preserved only in the Vedic chantings.
• The subjunctive tense of Vedic Sanskrit was also lost in Classical Sanskrit.
• More than 12 ways of forming infinitives in Vedic Sanskrit became redundant and clubbed under a single infinitive in Classical Sanskrit.

Other than these, no significant linguistic changes have occurred in Classic Sanskrit to distinguish it from Vedic Sanskrit.

Classical Sanskrit

Pali

Emergence of Prakrits

Prakrit (Sanskrit prākṛta प्राकृत (from pra-kṛti प्रकृति), "original, natural, artless, normal, ordinary, usual", i.e. "vernacular", in contrast to samskrta "excellently made", both adjectives elliptically referring to vak "speech") refers to the broad family of the Indic languages and dialects spoken in ancient India. The Prakrits became literary languages, generally patronized by kings identified with the ksatriya caste, but were regarded as illegitimate by the Brahmin orthodoxy. The earliest extant use of Prakrit are the inscriptions of Asoka, emperor of Northern India, and while the various Prakrit languages are associated with different patron dynasties, with different religions and different literary traditions, none of them were at any time an informal "mother tongue" in any area of India.

In Sanskrit drama, kings speak in Prakrit when addressing women or servants, in contrast to the Sanskrit used in reciting more formal poetic monologues.

The three Dramatic Prakrits - Sauraseni, Magadhi, Maharashtri, as well as Jain Prakrit each represent a distinct tradition of literature within the history of India. Other Prakrits are reported in historical sources, but have no extant corpus (e.g., Paisaci).

Prakrit is foremost a native term, designating "vernaculars" as opposed to the artificial Sanskrit. Some modern scholars follow this classification by including all Middle Indo-Aryan languages under the rubric of "Prakrits", while others emphasise the independent development of these languages, often separated from the history of Sanskrit by wide divisions of caste, religion, and geography. Ardhamagadhi, which was used extensively to write Jain scriptures, is the definitive form of Prakrit, while others are considered variants.

The Apabhramshas

The Prakrits (which includes Pali) were gradually transformed into Apabhramshas which were used until about 13th century. The term Apabhramsha refers to the dialects of North India before the rise of modern North Indian languages. The term apabhramsha implies a corrupt or non-standard language. A significant amount of Apabhramsha literature has been found in Jain libraries. While Amir Khusro and Kabir were writing in a language quite similar to modern Hindi, many poets, specially in regions that were still ruled by Hindu kings, continued to write in Apabhramsha. The Apabhramsha authors include Sarahapad of Kamarupa, Devasena of Dhar (9th c. CE), Pushpadanta of Manyakhet (9th c. CE), Dhanapal, Muni Ramsimha, Hemachandra of Patan, Raighu of Gwalior (15th CE). An early example of the use of Apabhramsha is in Vikramuurvashiiya of Kalidasa, when Pururava asks the animals in the forest about his beloved who had disappeared.

Emergence of modern Indo-Aryan languages

Indo-Dravidian languages

The origins of the Dravidian languages, as well as their subsequent development and the period of their differentiation, are unclear, and the situation is not helped by the lack of comparative linguistic research into the Dravidian languages. There are striking similarities between the Dravidian and Uralic and Altaic language groups, which suggest prolonged contact between the language families at some stage although a common origin appears unlikely. Inconclusive attempts have also been made to link the family with the Japonic languages, Basque, Korean, Sumerian, the Australian Aboriginal languages and the unknown language of the Indus valley civilisation.

Legends common to many Dravidian-speaking groups speak of their origin in a vast, now-sunken continent far to the south. Many linguists, however, tend to favour the theory that speakers of Dravidian languages spread southwards and eastwards through the Indian subcontinent, based on the fact that the southern Dravidian languages show some signs of contact with linguistic groups which the northern Dravidian languages do not. Proto-Dravidian is thought to have differentiated into Proto-North Dravidian, Proto-Central Dravidian and Proto-South Dravidian around 1500 BC, although some linguists have argued that the degree of differentiation between the sub-families points to an earlier split.

The existence of the Dravidian language family was first suggested in 1816 by Alexander D. Campbell in his Grammar of the Teloogoo Language, in which he and Francis W. Ellis argued that Tamil and Telugu were descended from a common, non-Indo-European ancestor. However, it was not until 1856 that Robert Caldwell published his Comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages, which considerably expanded the Dravidian umbrella and established it as one of the major language groups of the world. Caldwell coined the term "Dravidian" from the Sanskrit drāvida, which was used in a 7th century text to refer to the languages of the south of India. The publication of the Dravidian etymological dictionary by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau was a landmark event in Dravidian linguistics.

Origins of Tamil

The origins of Tamil, like the other Dravidian languages, but unlike most of the other established literary languages of India, are independent of Sanskrit. Tamil has the oldest literature amongst the Dravidian languages (Hart, 1975), but dating the language and the literature precisely is difficult. Literary works in India or Sri Lanka were preserved either in palm leaf manuscripts (implying repeated copying and recopying) or through oral transmission, making direct dating impossible. External chronological records and internal linguistic evidence, however, indicates that the oldest extant works were probably composed sometime between the 5th century BCE and the 2nd century CE.

The earliest extant text in Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, a work on poetics and grammar which describes the language of the classical period, the oldest portions of this book may date back to around 200 BCE (Hart, 1975). Preliminary results from archaelogical excavations in 2005 suggest that the oldest inscriptions in Tamil may date atleast to around 500 BCE. Apart from these, the earliest examples of Tamil writing we have today are rock inscriptions from the 3rd century BCE, which are written in an adapted form of the Brahmi script (Mahadevan, 2003). Many Tamils argue in favour of a much earlier date for the literature by referring to Tamil legends of a lost continent, or by positing links to the Indus valley civilisation, the Sumerian Tammuz, and the Australian Kamilaroi, but none of these theories have been recognised by the mainstream scholarly community.

Linguists categorise Tamil literature and language into three periods: ancient (500 BCE to 700 CE), medieval (700 CE to 1500 CE) and modern (1500 CE to the present). During the medieval period, a number of Sanskrit loan words were absorbed by Tamil, which many 20th century purists, notably Parithimaar Kalaignar and Maraimalai Adigal, later sought to remove. This movement was called thanith thamizh iyakkam (meaning pure Tamil movement). As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents, public speeches and scientific discourses is largely free of Sanskrit loan words. Between 800 and 1300 CE, Malayalam is believed to have evolved into a distinct language.

Emergence of modern Dravidian languages

Languages of other families in India

Tibeto-Burman languages

Meithei language

Austro-Asiatic languages

Santali language

References

• Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization, EVJS, vol. 11 (2004), issue 2 (Dec) (PDF)