Very long past
India is one of the most culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse regions one can imagine. Four major peoples, distinguished by the languages they speak, make up the population of the region. The majority of the population are Indo-European speaking a variety of languages related to European languages such as Greek, German, or English. Precisely when these peoples arrived is subject to much debate, but they seem to have arrived somewhere between 2000 BC and 1600 BC, and they brought with them their own religion and social system. The bulk of Indian religion and almost all of its literature is Indo-European. Second to the Indo-Europeans, but more ancient in India than the later immigrants, are a people who speak languages from the Dravidian family of languages. While we cannot be certain, the Dravidians were probably the authors of the great Indus River civilizations contemporary with the Mesopotamian civilizations to the west. In addition, the peoples in the northern mountains speak languages related to Chinese, Tibetan, or Mongolian. Finally, the smallest group, but most likely the oldest inhabitants of India, speak languages from the Australoid family, which are the languages spoken by indigenous peoples scattered throughout southeast Asia and Australia. Australoids are still present throughout the mountainous forests of the Deccan, but their traditional way of life, which was still vital only forty years ago, is beginning to die out.
The origin of the Dravidians, the earliest known inhabitants of India remains unknown. The ruins of the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley Civilization, which began about 2500 B.C., reveal an advanced culture thought to be a Dravidian one. Their descendants now live mainly in southern India and trace their ancestry back at least 4,500 years.
At about 1500 B.C., the people of central Asia called the Aryans conquered the Dravidians in northern India and drove some of them to the south. Today, two largest groups of India are the Indo-Aryans and the Dravidians. Most of the Indo-Aryans live in northern India while the majority of the Dravidians live in the south.
The Dravidian language comprises a family of about 20 languages. Four of these languages are spoken by about 200 million Indians, about a fifth of the country's population. Tamil is spoken in the state of Tamilnadu, Telugu in Andhra Pradesh, Kannada in Karnataka, and Malayalam in Kerala. Dravidians and Indo-Aryans. The Dravidian languages form a completely separate group from the Indo-European languages, although they too have borrowed many words from Sanskrit.
Earlier, Dravidian kings valued Brahmins (Hindu priests and scholars) from northern India for their literary skills and adopted much of their heritage.
Each Hindu belongs to a social class called a caste. There are about 3,000 different castes in India. Hindus belong to their parents' caste and find it very hard to join a higher caste. Each caste in India has its own customs. These customs limit social contact with members of other castes. Marriage between members of different castes seldom occurs.
Scripts and sounds in Indian languages
Many features of pronunciation are shared by all the languages of southern Asia. An important example is the distinction between one form of t, made with the tongue against the top teeth, and another form of t, made with the tip of the tongue curling back against the roof of the mouth. Another feature is the use of a consonant pronounced with a release of breath. In English script this is shown by adding h (in such words as Sikh).
India has different ways of writing its languages. Most of these written forms, or scripts, come from an ancient Indian script called Brahmi. Most regional languages have their own script, which helps give each region a sense of its own identity. The scripts run from left to right. There is no equivalent to capital letters. The script usually used for Sanskrit, which is called Devanagari or Nagari, is also used for Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali.
The Roman script used for European languages has the individual letter as its basic unit. In Indian scripts, however, the basic unit is the whole syllable - a consonant plus a vowel. (See the illustration with this article). The numerals in Indian scripts are the origin of the "Arabic" numerals used in European writing systems. This is because Arabic numerals, borrowed by Europeans, were themselves borrowed from India by the Arabs.
India, Languages of. The Indian subcontinent consists of a number of separate linguistic communities each of which share a common language and culture. The people of India speak many languages and dialects which are mostly varieties of about 14 principal languages. Some Indian languages have a long literary history - Sanskrit literature is 3,000 years old and Tamil 2,000. India also has some languages that do not have written forms.
The number of people speaking each language varies greatly. For example, Hindi has more than 250 million speakers, but relatively few people speak Andamanese. Although some of the languages are called "tribal" or "aboriginal," their populations may be larger than those that speak some European languages. For example, Bhili and Santali, both tribal languages, each have more than 4 million speakers. Gondi is spoken by nearly 2 million people.
Language experts have traced three main stages in the development of Indo-European languages. The first stage was the Sanskrit language. Migrant peoples from the northwest used Sanskrit in northern India sometime before 1000 B.C. In the next stage, Prakrit evolved from Sanskrit by 250 B.C. Pali was another language of these times that derived from Sanskrit. From about A.D. 1000, later forms of Prakrit, collectively called Apabhramsha, gave birth to the various regional languages in common usage today.
Vedic and classical Sanskrit. The old Sanskrit called Vedic or Vedic Sanskrit, was more complex than the later form of the language, called classical Sanskrit. The Vedic language became simplified as it changed into classical Sanskrit. In the 400's B.C., the grammarian Panini wrote a very detailed description of classical Sanskrit. This stopped the literary (written) language from changing any further.
Though simpler than Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sanskrit is more complex than modern languages. It has eight grammatical cases (inflected forms of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives--see INFLECTION). It also has three "numbers"--that is singular, plural, and dual (a class of noun, adjective, and verb form used when referring to two people or things). There is also an important spelling system called sandhi, in which a word ending varies according to its neighboring sound.
Pali, Prakrit, and Apabhramsha. While Sanskrit remained largely unchanged as the classical language of literature, the spoken language evolved through further stages. The first of these was Pali, adopted as the language of Buddhism (see BUDDHISM).
A number of different spoken languages collectively called Prakrit--meaning "natural" speech, as opposed to Sanskrit, which means "refined speech"--continued the process of evolution. Some forms of Prakrit were used for literature, while the spoken dialects continued to evolve under the name Apabhramsha ("corrupt" speech).
Modern Indo-European languages. The main modern languages to evolve from the various regional forms of Apabhramsha are Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, and Sindhi. These languages began to emerge after A.D. 1000. As they evolved, they borrowed words from Sanskrit and also from Persian (one of the languages of India's Muslim dynasties). These northern Indian languages are now major regional languages, each spoken by several million people. Nepali, a close relative of Hindi, is the national language of Nepal. Bengali is the national language of Bangladesh as well as being the language of West Bengal. Modern Hindi, which is based on a Delhi dialect but borrows many words from Sanskrit, is India's majority language. Hindi's sister language, Urdu, has the same grammar but borrows many words from Persian and Arabic. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan.
Apart from Persian and Arabic loan words, modern Indo-European languages have borrowed many words from
Classification of India's languages
The Indian languages belong to four language families: Indo-European, Dravidian, Mon-Khmer, and Sino-Tibetan. Indo-European and Dravidian languages are used by a large majority of India's population. The language families divide roughly into geographic groups. Languages of the Indo-European group are spoken mainly in northern and central regions. The languages of southern India are mainly of the Dravidian group. Some ethnic groups in Assam and other parts of eastern India speak languages of the Mon-Khmer group. People in the northern Himalayan region and near the Burmese border speak Sino-Tibetan languages.
The scripts used for most northern Indian languages are closely related to Devanagari. South Indian scripts generally have a much rounder shape. This is probably because they were originally written on palm leaves, and straight, horizontal lines were avoided because they would cut into the fiber of the leaf. The script used for Urdu is the Persian script introduced by the Turks and Afghans. It runs from right to left. It has been slightly modified to accommodate some Indian sounds.
Acknowledgement:
Word Book, 2002