Sanskritisation is the process of introducing features from Sanskrit, such as vocabulary and grammar, into other languages. [1] It is sometimes associated with the "Hindu-isation" of a linguistic community, or less commonly, with introducing a more upper-caste status into a community. [2] [3] Many languages throughout South Asia and Southeast Asia were greatly influenced by Sanskrit (or its descendant languages, the Prakrits and modern-day Indo-Aryan languages) historically. [4] [5] [6]
Sanskritisation often stands in opposition to the Persianisation or Englishisation of a language within South Asia, [7] [8] as occurs with the Hindustani language, which in its Sanskritised, Persianised, and English-influenced registers becomes Hindi, Urdu, and Hinglish respectively. [9] [10] [11] Support for Sanskritisation in South Asia runs highest among Brahmins and Hindu nationalists. [12]
Sanskritization of the names of people and places is also commonplace in India, except in many areas like Tamil Nadu. [13] [14] [15]
During the medieval era, the Indian languages had taken in a lot of Perso-Arabic influences as a result of Muslim invasions, particularly in the northwestern subcontinent; [19] colonial-era education policies, religious nationalism, and the influence of some of the more Sanskritised Indian languages played a role in Hindus and Muslims increasingly separating in terms of their linguistic influences, [20] with Hindus tending towards the usage of Sanskrit words and the Sanskrit-associated Devanagari script for writing Hindi. [21] [22] [23]
Since the 1947 Partition of India, the Indian government, which at one point considered making Sanskrit the national language, instead has sought to further Sanskritise Hindi, [24] considering it to be easier for Indians to learn, [25] and as a way of distancing Hindi from the Urdu spoken in the newly formed country of Pakistan. [26] Sanskrit has been used to form new words to describe modern concepts and technologies in several South Asian languages by forming calques based on English words. [27] [22] [28] In addition, Sanskrit words that have been nativised into other languages have been mixed with words from other language families, such as the Dravidian languages, to form new words. [29]
Cultural debates have emerged over how much Sanskrit should appear in Hindi and how acceptable Persian and English influences should be, [30] [31] with Hindu nationalists favouring Sanskritised Hindi, [32] opposing Urdu in part because it is a Muslim-associated language, [33] and some boycotting the Hindi-language Bollywood film industry for featuring too much Urdu and English in its movies. [34] [35]
Modern Standard Hindi, commonly referred to as Hindi, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in North India, and serves as the lingua franca of the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been described as a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language, which itself is based primarily on the Khariboli dialect of Delhi and neighbouring areas of North India. Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is one of the two official languages of the Government of India, along with English. It is an official language in nine states and three union territories and an additional official language in three other states. Hindi is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India.
Punjabi, sometimes spelled Panjabi, is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Punjab region of Pakistan and India. It is one of the most widely spoken native languages in the world with approximately 113 million native speakers.
Sanskrit is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting effect on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.
Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, where it is also an official language alongside English. In India, Urdu is an Eighth Schedule language whose status and cultural heritage is recognised by the Constitution of India; and it also has an official status in several Indian states. In Nepal, Urdu is a registered regional dialect and in South Africa it is a protected language in the constitution. It is also spoken as a minority language in Afghanistan and Bangladesh, with no official status.
Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northern India, the Deccan Plateau and Pakistan, and used as a lingua franca in both countries. Hindustani is a pluricentric language with two standard registers, known as Hindi and Urdu. Thus, it is also called Hindi–Urdu. Colloquial registers of the language fall on a spectrum between these standards. In modern times, a third variety of Hindustani with significant English influences has also appeared which is sometimes called Hinglish or Urdish.
The Indo-Aryan languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Maldives. Moreover, apart from the Indian subcontinent, large immigrant and expatriate Indo-Aryan–speaking communities live in Northwestern Europe, Western Asia, North America, the Caribbean, Southeast Africa, Polynesia and Australia, along with several million speakers of Romani languages primarily concentrated in Southeastern Europe. There are over 200 known Indo-Aryan languages.
Hinglish is the macaronic hybrid use of Indian English and the Hindustani language. Its name is a portmanteau of the words Hindi and English. In the context of spoken language, it involves code-switching or translanguaging between these languages whereby they are freely interchanged within a sentence or between sentences.
Kauravi, also known as Khaṛībolī, is a Western Hindi dialect descended from Shauraseni Prakrit that is mainly spoken in Northwestern Uttar Pradesh.
The Dardic languages, or Hindu-Kush Indo-Aryan languages, are a group of several Indo-Aryan languages spoken in northern Pakistan, northwestern India and parts of northeastern Afghanistan. This region has sometimes been referred to as Dardistan.
Braj Bihari Kachru was an Indian-American linguist. He was Jubilee Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He published studies on the Kashmiri language.
Hindustani is one of the predominant languages of South Asia, with federal status in the republics of India and Pakistan in its standardized forms of Hindi and Urdu respectively. It is widely spoken and understood as a second language in Nepal, Bangladesh, and the Persian Gulf and as such is considered a lingua franca in the northern Indian subcontinent. It is also one of the most widely spoken languages in the world by total number of speakers. It developed in north India, principally during the Mughal Empire, when the Persian language exerted a strong influence on the Western Hindi languages of central India; this contact between the Hindu and Muslim cultures resulted in the core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the Indian dialect of Hindi spoken in Delhi, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi, being enriched with Persian loanwords. Rekhta, or "mixed" speech, which came to be known as Hindustani, Hindi, Hindavi, and Urdu, also locally known as Lashkari or Lashkari Zaban in long form, was thus created. This form was elevated to the status of a literary language, and after the partition of colonial India and independence this collection of dialects became the basis for modern standard Hindi and Urdu. Although these official languages are distinct registers with regards to their formal aspects, such as modern technical vocabulary, they continue to be all but indistinguishable in their vernacular form. From the colonial era onwards, Hindustani has also taken in many words from English, with an urban English-influenced variety emerging known as Hinglish.
The Persian language and Urdu have had an intricate relationship throughout the history of the latter. Persian historically played a significant role in the formation and development of the modern Urdu, and today acts as its prestige language.
The Hindi–Urdu controversy arose in 19th century colonial India out of the debate over whether Modern Standard Hindi or Standard Urdu should be chosen as a national language.
Indian English has developed a number of dialects, distinct from the General/Standard Indian English that educators have attempted to establish and institutionalise, and it is possible to distinguish a person's sociolinguistic background from the dialect that they employ. These dialects are influenced by the different languages that different sections of the country also speak, side by side with English. The dialects can differ markedly in their phonology, to the point that two speakers using two different dialects can find each other's accents mutually unintelligible.
Sant Bhasha is a liturgical and scriptural language composed of vocabulary common to northern Indian languages, which was extensively used by saints and poets to compose religious verses. It can be understood by readers with a background in either Punjabi, Hindi-Urdu and its dialects.
Sanskritism is a term used to indicate words that are coined out of Sanskrit for modern usage in India, in Sri Lanka and elsewhere or for neologisms. They are often formed as calques of English words. These terms are similar in nature to taxon terms coined from Latin and Greek.
Tatsama are Sanskrit loanwords in modern Indo-Aryan languages like Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Hindi, Gujarati, and Sinhala and in Dravidian languages like Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. They generally belong to a higher and more erudite register than common words, many of which are directly inherited from Old Indo-Aryan (tadbhava). The tatsama register can be compared to the use of loan words of Greek or Latin origin in English.
Yamuna Kachru was Professor Emerita of Linguistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Englishisation refers to the introduction of English-language influences into other languages. English, as a world language, has had a very significant impact on other languages, with many languages borrowing words or grammar from English or forming calques based on English words. Englishisation is often paired with the introduction of Western culture into other cultures, and has resulted in a significant degree of code-mixing of English with other languages as well as the appearance of new varieties of English. Other languages have also synthesised new literary genres through their contact with English, and various forms of "language play" have emerged through this interaction. Englishisation has also occurred in subtle ways because of the massive amount of English content that is translated into other languages.
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help)