Sanskrit- Cutting Through the Nonsense

While Sanskrit is not a widely spoken vernacular or a first language for any group of people, it is far from dead or even dormant. Apart from its use in religious rituals, music and dance and programs of governments, colleges and universities, there are also communities of hobbyist and scholars who actively use and promote Sanskrit including conducting events around the world. Even entire villages in India, such as Mattur in Karnataka and Jhiri in Madhya Pradesh, use Sanskrit in daily conversation. The growing number of Sanskrit online resources, including this website, are testaments to the fact that Sanskrit is far from dead or dormant.

This oft-repeated claim suffers from both ignorance and the logical fallacy of false equivalence. Those who make it often misunderstand what makes a good programming language and how natural languages function. Natural languages, including Sanskrit, are designed for human communication, which relies on nuance, context, and ambiguity. Programming languages, in contrast, are built for unambiguous machine instructions with specificity, precision, brevity and logic. Languages like Sanskrit and Latin have highly structured and rule-based grammars with strict syntactic rules but these allow words to be arranged more flexibly, which might be harder to parse algorithmically. Some languages like Mandarin use fewer words to express ideas, while others like German tend to be more verbose. Almost all human languages have multiple meanings for words based on context e.g. in Sanskrit words can take the same form in multiple vibhaktis (cases) and give different meanings depending on the context or the instances covered in our topic Classical Sanskrit- Lexicon Construction. While Panini’s grammar has been studied as a system of production rules, this does not mean Sanskrit is suited for programming—only that its structure is of theoretical interest in computational linguistics. It is a false equivalence to assume that a language governed by strict grammatical rules would automatically be well-suited for programming. Precision in grammar does not translate to computational efficiency or expressiveness in coding. Furthermore, there is no empirical evidence supporting this claim. Despite India's dominance in IT and the Government of India's long-standing institutions like C-DAC, no Sanskrit-based programming language has outperformed established English-based programming languages. Modern programming languages have extensive libraries, frameworks, and active developer communities, while Sanskrit lacks even basic compilers or development environments. Unlike English, which dominates programming documentation and technical communication, Sanskrit has no established ecosystem for coding, debugging, or software development. Creating a Sanskrit-based programming language would face enormous practical challenges with no clear advantage. While Sanskrit’s structured grammar is remarkable, it does not inherently make it superior for programming—this claim remains a myth without technical merit.

This is a extremely questionable claim given the fact that humans arrived in the Indian subcontinent around 65,000 years ago, long before Sanskrit emerged, and early languages would have developed organically over thousands of years. The tribal languages of India, such as those from the Austroasiatic (e.g., Mundari) and Tibeto-Burman families, have unique linguistic roots that predate Sanskrit influence. The expanseive, vibrant and urbanized Indus Valley Civilization (c. 2600–1900 BCE) had a script that remains undeciphered, but its linguistic identity appears distinct from Sanskrit, which only emerged around 1500 BCE with the arrival of Indo-Aryans. Meanwhile, Dravidian languages like Tamil evolved independently, with Sangam literature dating back to at least 500 BCE, definitely predating Classical Sanskrit and maybe Sanskrit in general. Additionally, the spoken Prakrit dialects were widespread before grammarians like PaNini formalized Sanskrit, and many ancient Buddhist and Jain texts were written in Prakrit rather than Sanskrit. While Sanskrit has played a crucial role in shaping many Indian languages, it also borrowed a lot from the other languages as it branched from its Proto-Indo-Iranian-European origins. Thus, it is not the "mother" of the languages of the Indian subcontinent but rather one important branch in India's diverse linguistic history.

Though Hindu scriptures were primarily composed in Sanskrit, it was also used to compose Buddhist and Jain scriptures after the elimination of Pali. Also, even though the priestly class dominated Sanskrit and later used varna system to actively restricted access to other castes, historical records show that Sanskrit was used by people from various social backgrounds. Great poets and scholars like Kalidasa and Valmiki were not Brahmins.

While Sanskrit is widely used in rituals and scriptures, it has also been the language of arts, musicology, crafts, architecture, classical literature, poetry, drama, philosophy- both religious and secular, and sciences like mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, medicine (Ayurveda), wellness (Yoga) and political science (Arthashastra). Study of history of science would be incomplete without Sanskrit texts where concepts of zero, infinity, and calculus were first discussed in the works of Aryabhatta and Bhaskaracharya. A lot of Sanskrit texts across many subjects are being unearthed awaiting re-discovery and re-interpretation.

Sanskrit has been written in various scripts over time, including Brahmi, Grantha, and others. Most Indian regional language scripts have been used to write Sanskrit. Devanagari is commonly used today, but it is not the only script for Sanskrit. With IAST transliterations Sanskrit has reached a far wider audience that would have been possible with just using Devanagari.

Given its long existence Sanskrit has remained very resilient in its form. However, this is not on account of its reluctance or inability to change but more on account of its inherent quality to be relevant even as the world changes. Further, apart from the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit forms Sanskrit also has minor regional variations e.g. in pronunciations, but surely for a language of its antiquity this high level of monolithism is remarkable. That said, Sanskrit's preservation has been largely institutional rather than through widespread vernacular adoption. Languages naturally diversify over time when spoken by large populations, so Sanskrit's relative monolithism could be seen as a product of its role as a scholarly rather than a commonly spoken language.