Linguistics of

Ancient India and

its main directions
The story of a nation is linked with its history, and we may get
to know a lot from material remains of the past, but linguistic
history is an equally important factor that can be traced to
understand the origins of a community and where it is headed.

The languages spoken in modern day India are the result of

hundreds of years of evolution of languages from different
speech families. And it is the last field, the sub-field of Historical
Linguistics, that helps us trace their origin.
 The four major language groups of
India

Austro-Asiatic Indo-Aryan
earliest known speech family all ancient languages fall in this
speech family

Tibeto-Burman Dravidian
along with Austro-Asiatic, they prevalent in all of South India
have the most speakers
 By the 4th century Fields of metrics,
Panini composed a lexicography,
whole grammar of phonetics, and
Sanskrit which was a grammar were
culmination of a long recognised, the
line of linguistic semantic study of
research based on words as well as
phonetics and sentences were carried
phonology. out.
❖ Many general grammar rules of today were already
pinpointed, such as the verb as the core of the sentence
and the other words in relation to it could be the agent
or the object.
❖ The other being the rules for the grammar, and how the
words are set in an order.
❖ We already had compound words called tatpurusha,
attributive compounds like doorknob, and exocentric
compounds called bahuvrihi which are still in general
use.
 Morphology

The analysis of word

formation held a central role
in the Indian tradition.

Phonetics

Already by an early period, the

phonetic analysis of Sanskrit
had reached an advanced stage
in India.
 Pragmatics Semantics

The distinction between the The study of meaning has

literal or essential meanings of always held an important
words and their ‘use’ played a place in the Indian linguistic
hugely important role. tradition.

Syntax

The Indian tradition has little to

say on questions of word order,
reflecting the highly flexible
word order of Sanskrit.
Thanks!