INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES

also called Indic languages subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, spoken in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Linguists generally assign the Indo-Aryan languages to three major periods: Old, Middle, and New Indo-Aryan. These periods are linguistic, not strictly chronological. Old Indo-Aryan includes different dialects and linguistic states referred to in common as Sanskrit. The most archaic Old Indo-Aryan is that of sacred texts called Vedas. Classical Sanskrit is the name given to the literary language that represents a polished form of various dialects. The late Vedic dialect described by the grammarian Panini (c. 6th century BC) is also commonly called Classical Sanskrit. Middle Indo-Aryan includes both the dialects of inscriptions from the 3rd century BC to the 4th century AD and literary languages. Apabhramsa dialects represent the latest stage of Middle Indo-Aryan development. Though all Middle Indo-Aryan languages are included under the name Prakrit, it is customary to speak of the Prakrits as excluding Apabhramsa. New Indo-Aryan is represented by such modern vernaculars as Hindi and Bengali, which began to emerge from about the 10th century AD. These too have earlier and later stages, culminating in the present-day languages. New Indo-Aryan languages accounted for about 490,000,000 speakers in India, or approximately 74 percent of the population in the early 1980s. Considering the approximately 85,000,000 Bengali speakers in Bangladesh, approximately 63,000,000 speakers accounted for by Punjabi and Sindhi in Pakistan, and 11,000,000 Sinhalese (Sinhala) speakers in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), the total number of New Indo-Aryan speakers is well over 650,000,000. According to the latest Indian census, there are 547 mother tongues of the Indo-Aryan group in use within the bounds of postpartition (1947) India. Some of these are dialects that are used by few speakers; others are official state languages having 30,000,000 or 50,000,000 speakers. The major groups of New Indo-Aryan languages are given in the table Modern (New) Indo-Aryan Languages. Structurally and historically, Hindi and Urdu are one, although they are now official languages of different countries written in different alphabets. The term hindi (also hindvi) is known from as early as the 13th century. The term zaban-e-urdu language of the imperial camp came into use in about the 17th century. In the south, Urdu was used by Muslim conquerors of the 14th century. Many of the languages in the table are official state languages, the media of education up to the university level and of official transactions. Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is the co-official language (with English) of the Republic of India and is used as a lingua franca throughout North India. It has varieties according to the mother tongue of the area; e.g., Bombay Hindi and Calcutta Hindi. Each of the major state languages has several other dialects in addition to the standard dialect adopted for official purposes. Including the various dialects down to the village level, it can be said that a chain of communication stretches across North India such that each dialect forms a link with each adjacent dialect. On the level of official languages this is not so: a Gujarati speaker will not readily understand colloquial Bengali. Additional reading General works Jules Bloch, L'Indo-aryen du veda aux temps modernes (1934; rev. Eng. trans., Indo-Aryan from the Vedas to Modern Times, 1965), a masterly survey of Indo-Aryan throughout its history; R.L. Turner, A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages (1966), an indispensable source in which Sanskrit word headings are given Middle Indo-Aryan forms and New Indo-Aryan cognates; M.B. Emeneau, The Dialects of Old Indo-Aryan, in Henrik Birnbaum and Jaan Puhvel (eds.), Ancient Indo-European Dialects, pp. 123138 (1966), a good summary, with discussion of proposed theories and references; Suryakanta, A Practical Vedic Dictionary (1981). Old Indo-Aryan Thomas Burrow, The Sanskrit Language, new and rev. ed. (1973), a summary of the prehistory and history of Sanskrit, with references to Middle Indo-Aryan, which contains somewhat personal views but is valuable for its discussion of non-Aryan influences on Sanskrit; Louis Renou, Histoire de la langue sanskrite (1956), an insightful summary of the grammar, vocabulary, and style of different stages of Sanskrit, with text selections and translations; Manfred Mayrhofer, A Concise Etymological Sanskrit Dictionary, 4 vol. (195380), contains sober etymologies, full references, and a discussion of loanwords and words supposed to have been borrowed from Dravidian. Middle Indo-Aryan Richard Pischel, Grammatik der Prakrit-Sprachen (1900; Eng. trans., Comparative Grammar of the Prakrit Languages, 2nd ed., 1965), an encyclopaedic grammar of all the Prakrits except Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit and Pali, which includes a good discussion of the different Prakrits in the introduction (now in need of updating); S.M. Katre, Prakrit Languages and Their Contribution to Indian Culture, 2nd ed. (1964), a general survey of the Prakrits, including Pali; Ludwig Alsdorf, Apabhramsa-Studien, pp. 517, 2037 (1937, reprinted 1966), important studies discussing noun and verb inflection. Modern Indo-Aryan John Beames, A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages: To Wit, Hindi, Panjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, and Bangali, 3 vol. (187279, reprinted 1966); and A.F.R. Hoernle, A Comparative Grammar of the Gaudian Languages with Special Reference to the Eastern Hindi (1880, reprinted 1975), general comparative grammars of the New Indo-Aryan languagesthough in need of modernization, still indispensable; George A. Grierson, On the Modern Indo-Aryan Vernaculars (1931), a reprint of two long articles, tracing the phonologic developments that led to New Indo-Aryan; S.K. Chatterjee, Indo-Aryan and Hindi, 2nd rev. ed. (1960), a series of lectures briefly tracing the history of Indo-Aryan, with particular emphasis on Hindi and its relation to other Indo-Aryan languages and on the general language problem in India. George Cardona Historical survey of the Indo-Aryan languages The modern Indo-Aryan stage The division of the Indian subcontinent into linguistic states and even into countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India) is a recent phenomenon (see table). Even after independence from Britain was achieved and partition had taken place, Bombay state existed until it was split into Gujarat and Maharashtra states in 1960. The division of Punjab into Punjab and Haryana states in 1966 occurred as a result of Punjabi agitation for a separate linguistic state. Before independence, under British rule (entrenched from the 18th century), there were princely states within dialect areas; under Mughal rule (16th18th centuries), Persian was the language which was used by the court and by courts of justice and this practice continued in the latter function for a time under the British. Though HindiUrdu may have been a lingua franca, however, the great dialectal diversity of earlier times continued. Some of the modern Indo-Aryan languages have literary traditions reaching back centuries, with enough textual continuity to distinguish Old, Middle, and Modern Bengali, Gujarati, and so on. Bengali can trace its literature back to Old Bengali carya-padas, late Buddhist verses thought to date from the 10th century; Gujarati literature dates from the 12th century (Salibhadra's Bharatesvara-bahubali-rasa) and to a period when the area of western Rajasthan and Gujarat are believed to have had a literary language in common, called Old Western Rajasthani. Janesvara's commentary on the Bhagavadgita in Old Marathi dates from the 13th century and early Maithili from the 14th century (Jyotisvara's Varna-ratnakara), while Assamese literary work dates from the 14th and 15th centuries (Madhava Kandali's translation of the Ramayana, Sankaradeva's Vaisnavite works). Also of the 14th century are the Kashmiri poems of Lalla (Lallavakyani), and Nepali works have also been assigned to this epoch. The work of Jagannath Das in Old Oriya dates from the 15th century. Amir Khosrow used the term hindvi in the 13th century, and he composed couplets that contained Hindi. In early times, however, other dialects were predominant in the midlands (Madhyadesa) as literary media, especially Braj Bhasa (e.g., Surdas' Sursagar, 16th century) and Awadhi (Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, 16th century). In the south, in Golconda (Andhra, near Hyderabad), Urdu poetry was seriously cultivated in the 17th century, and Urdu poets later came north to Delhi and Lucknow. Punjabi was used in Sikh works as early as the 16th century, and Sindhi was used in Sufi (Islamic) poetry of the 17th19th centuries. In addition, there is evidence in late Middle Indo-Aryan works for the use of early New Indo-Aryan; e.g., provincial words and verses are cited. The creation of linguistic states has reinforced the use of certain standard dialects for communication within a state in official transactions, teaching, and on the radio. In addition, attempts are being made to evolve standardized technical vocabularies in these languages. Dialectal diversity has not ceased, however, resulting in much bilingualism; for example, a native speaker of Braj Bhasa uses Hindi for communicating in large cities such as Delhi. Moreover, the attempt to establish a single national language other than English continues. This search has its origin in national and Hindu movements of the 19th century down to the time of Mahatma Gandhi, who promoted the use of a simplified HindiUrdu, called Hindustani. The constitution of India in 1947 stressed the use of Hindi, providing for it to be the official national language after a period of 15 years during which English would continue in use. When the time came, however, Hindi could not be declared the sole national language; English remains a co-official language. Though Hindi can claim to be the lingua franca of a large population in North India, other languages such as Bengali have long and great literary traditionsincluding the work of Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagoreand equal status as intellectual languages, so that resistance to the imposition of Hindi exists. This resistance is even stronger in Dravidian-speaking southern India. The use of English as an official language entails problems, however, because with the use of state languages for education, the level of English competence is declining. Another danger faced is the agitation for more separate linguistic states, threatening India with linguistic fragmentation hearkening back to earlier days. Characteristics of the modern Indo-Aryan languages The trends noted in Middle Indo-Aryan continue in New Indo-Aryan. The Middle Indo-Aryan vowel sequences ai and au were changed to single vowels during the development of New Indo-Aryan, final vowels were shortened and deleted, and d and dh sounds between vowels were replaced by the sounds r and rh. The noun cases were further reduced, and the introduction of nominal (noun) forms into the verb system became more pronounced. Literary languages tend to become somewhat removed from the usual standard colloquial. Literary, or High, Hindi, for example, tends to replace some of the Perso-Arabic vocabulary with Sanskritic items, whereas literary Urdu makes great use of Perso-Arabic words. The gap is formalized in Bengali, in which a distinction is made between the highly Sanskritic language Sadhu-Bhasa and the colloquial standard called Calit-Bhasa.