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The Indo-Aryan languages form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, thus belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. The term Indic refers to the same group without the negative connotations of "Aryan race". Note that in opposition to the generic adjective Indian, Indic is the term used in the context of Indo-European linguistics, and is not strictly a geographical term, so that non-Indo-European languages spoken in India are not included in the term, while the Mitanni, on the other hand, probably were speakers of an Indic language without ever having settled on the Indian subcontinent. SIL in a 2005 estimate counts a total of 209 varieties, the largest in terms of native speakers being Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu, ca. 540 million), Bengali (ca. 200 million), Punjabi (ca. 100 million), Marathi (ca. 70 million), Gujarati (ca. 45 million), Oriya (ca. 30 million) and Sindhi (ca. 20 million), with a total number of native speakers of more than 900 million.
History The earliest attestations of the group are in Vedic Sanskrit, the language used in the ancient preserved texts of India, the foundational canon of Hinduism known as the Vedas. The language of the Mitanni is of similar age, but is only attested fragmentarily. In ca. the fifth century BC, the Sanskrit language was codified and standardized by the grammarian Panini; this led (in about 200 BC) to what is now known as 'Classical' Sanskrit. However, although this preserved the integrity of written language for a long time, the spoken language continues to evolve, and by the sixth century, Sanskrit as a spoken language was rare, being by and large replaced by its descendants, the Prakrits. All the Prakrits share a common ancestry, but they are not necessarily mutually intelligible. In medieval times, the Prakrits diversified into various Middle Indic dialects. Apabhramsa is the conventional cover term for transitional dialects connecting late Middle Indic with early Modern Indic, spanning roughly the 6th to 13th centuries. Some of these dialects showed considerable literary production; the Sravakachar of Devasena (dated to the 930s) is now considered to be the first Hindi book. The next major milestone occurred with the Muslim invasions of India in the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. Under the flourishing Mughal empire, Persian became very influential as the language of prestige of the Islamic courts. However, Persian was soon displaced by Urdu. This Indo-Aryan language is a combination of Persian and Arabic in its vocabulary with the grammar of the local dialects. The two largest languages that formed from Apabhransa were Bengali and Hindi; others include Gujarati, Oriya, Marathi and Punjabi. In the Hindi-speaking areas, the main form was Braj-bhasha, which is still spoken today, but was replaced in the 19th century by the Khari Boli dialect. However, a large amount of modern spoken Hindi vocabulary is derived from Perso-Arabic. This state of affairs continued until the Partition of India in 1947. Hindustani (mixture of Urdu & Hindi) was replaced by 'Hindi' as the official language of India, and soon the Perso-Arabic words of Urdu began to be excised from the official Hindi corpus, in a bid to make the language more 'Indian'. A throwback to Hindi poets like Tulsidas resulted in what is known as a Sanskritization of the language. Arabic or Persian words in common parlance were slowly replaced by Sanskrit words, sometimes borrowed wholesale, or in new compounds. In contemporary times, there is a continuum of Hindi-Urdu, with heavily-Persianized Urdu at one end and Sanskritized Hindi at the other, although the basic grammar remains identical. Most people speak a blend of the two, a dialect known as Hindustani. List See also Bibliography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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