Sanskrit Keyboard Layout

Sanskrit

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Sanskrit
संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam
Pronunciation:    [sə̃skɹ̩t̪əm]
Spoken in:    India
Total speakers:    14,135 fluent speakers in India as of 2001[1]
Language family:    Indo-European
Indo-Iranian
Indo-Aryan
Sanskrit  Writing system:

Devanāgarī (de facto), various Brāhmī-based scripts, and Latin alphabet
Official status
Official language in:    One of the 22 scheduled languages of India
Regulated by:    No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:    sa
ISO 639-2:    san
ISO 639-3:    san

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Sanskrit (संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for short संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam) is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism,[2] and one of the 22 official languages of India.[3]
Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini, around the 4th century BCE. Its position in the cultures of South and Southeast Asia is akin to that of Latin and Greek in Europe and it has significantly influenced most modern languages of Nepal and India.[4]
The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, its oldest core dating back to as early as 1500 BCE,[5] qualifying Rigvedic Sanskrit as one of the oldest attestation of any Indo-Iranian language, and one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family.[6]
The corpus of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical and Hindu religious texts. Today, Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals in the forms of hymns and mantras. Spoken Sanskrit is still in use in a few traditional institutions in India, and there are many attempts at revival.

Writing system

Kashmiri Shaivaite manuscript in the Sharada script (c. 17th century)
Sanskrit was spoken in an oral society, and the oral tradition was maintained through the development of early classical Sanskrit literature.[28] Writing was not introduced to India until after Sanskrit had evolved into the Prakrits; when it was written, the choice of writing system was influenced by the regional scripts of the scribes. As such, virtually all of the major writing systems of South Asia have been used for the production of Sanskrit manuscripts. Since the late 19th century, Devanagari has been considered as the de facto writing system for Sanskrit,[29] quite possibly because of the European practice of printing Sanskrit texts in this script.
The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit date to the 1st century BCE.[30] They are in the Brahmi script, which was originally used for Prakrit, not Sanskrit.[31] It has been described as a “paradox” that the first evidence of written Sanskrit occurs centuries later than that of the Prakrit languages which are its linguistic descendants.[30][32] When Sanskrit was written down, it was first used for texts of an administrative, literary or scientific nature. The sacred texts were preserved orally, and were set down in writing, “reluctantly” (according to one commentator), and at a comparatively late date.[31]
Brahmi evolved into a multiplicity of scripts of the Brahmic family, many of which were used to write Sanskrit. Roughly contemporary with the Brahmi, the Kharosthi script was used in the northwest of the subcontinent. Later (around the 4th to 8th centuries CE) the Gupta script, derived from Brahmi, became prevalent. From ca. the 8th century, the Sharada script evolved out of the Gupta script. The latter was displaced in its turn by Devanagari from ca. the 11/12th century, with intermediary stages such as the Siddham script. In Eastern India, the Bengali script and, later, the Oriya script, were used. In the south where Dravidian languages predominate, scripts used for Sanskrit include Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Grantha.

Sanskrit in modern Indian and other Brahmi scripts. May Śiva bless those who take delight in the language of the gods. (Kalidasa)

Romanization

Since the late 18th century, Sanskrit has been transliterated using the Latin alphabet. The system most commonly used today is the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), which has been the academic standard since 1888/1912. ASCII-based transliteration schemes have evolved due to difficulties representing Sanskrit characters in computer systems. These include Harvard-Kyoto and ITRANS, a transliteration scheme that is used widely on the Internet, especially in Usenet and in email, for considerations of speed of entry as well as rendering issues. With the wide availability of Unicode aware web browsers, IAST has become common online.
It’s also possible to type using an alphanumeric keyboard and transliterate to devanagari using software like Mac OS X’s international support.
European scholars in the 19th century generally preferred Devanagari for the transcription and reproduction of whole texts and lengthy excerpts. However, references to individual words and names in texts composed in European languages were usually represented with Roman transliteration. From the 20th century onwards, due to production costs, textual editions edited by Western scholars have mostly been in Romanized transliteration.

Sanskrit grammar

The grammar of the Sanskrit language has a complex verbal system, rich nominal declension, and extensive use of compound nouns. It was studied and codified by Sanskrit grammarians from the later Vedic period (roughly 8th century BC), culminating in the Pāṇinian grammar of the 4th century BC.