The Sanskrit language – one of the oldest of the Indo– European group to possess a substantial literature – has particular interest for linguists because of the circumstances of its becoming known to Western scholars and the stimulus thus given to historical linguistics. It has also been of enormous and continuing importance as the classical language of Indian culture and the sacred language of Hinduism.
Sanskrit, in its older form of Vedic Sanskrit (or simply Vedic), was brought into the northwest of India by the Aryans some time in the second half of the second millennium BC and was at that period relatively little differentiated from its nearest relation within the Indo–European group, Avestan in the Iranian family of languages (these two being the oldest recorded within the Indo–Iranian branch of Indo–European). From there, it spread to the rest of North India as the Aryans enlarged the area that they occupied, developing into the classical form of the language, which subsequently became fixed as the learned language of culture and religion throughout the subcontinent, while the spoken language developed into the various Prakrits. There is ample evidence of rapid evolution during the Vedic period, with the language of the latest phase, attested for example in the Upanisads, showing considerable grammatical simplification from that of the earliest hymns. The later Vedic is, in broad terms, the form of the language that Panini described with such exactness in his grammar around the fourth century BC, thereby creating – no doubt unintentionally – an absolute standard for the language thereafter; his work is clearly the culmination of a long grammatical tradition, based on concern to preserve the Vedas unaltered (hence the stress on phonetics), and is itself intended for memorization and oral transmission, as its brevity indicates.