Regional Languages and Literatures
With the Aryans came their language
Sanskrit, a member of the large Indo-European family of languages. All
the major north Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati,
Marathi and others are spin-offs of Sanskrit and are thus called the
Indic or Indo-Aryan languages.
The Dravidian languages – Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada -
are native to southern India, and have also been influenced by
Sanskrit and Hindi over the years.
¤ The Similarity Between The Languages
The origins of the languages of Central Asia, Europe and India seem
to have been similar thousands of years ago. Perhaps it was because
the Aryans migrated from their lands, taking their language with them.
Hence the similarity between certain words of Indic (Indo-Aryan)
languages and other Indo-European languages. Like the words matri
(Sanskrit) and mater (English) meaning mother, salaam (Urdu) and
shalom (Israeli) meaning greetings, shukriya (Urdu) and shukrant
(Sudanese) meaning thank you, chai (Hindi) and tchai (Greek) meaning
tea, almari (Hindi) and almirah (Portugese) meaning cupboard, luft
hansa (Sanskrit) and Lufthansa (German) meaning air bird, and so on.
¤ Other Sources of Origin of Indian Languages
But the story of the origins of our 1652 languages doesn’t end
there. There are two other sources of language in India – the
Austric (from the regions near Australia) and Sino-Tibetan speeches.
In fact, the Dravidians and these two groups had been living here
much before the Aryans came riding in.
The Austric group is the mother of the Kol and Munda speeches of
Central and Eastern India, Nicobarese of Nicobar Islands, Santhal of
Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, Ho of Bihar, and other tribal speeches. A
linguist would happily link up India with Burma, Indo-China, Malaya
and Indonesia.
The Sino-Tibetan speakers might have sneaked in through the
Brahmaputra Valley in pre-historic times. Though numerous, their
languages remained in shadows, except for some which are prominent
till today like Lahauli and Kinnauri (of Himachal Pradesh), Lepcha and
Newari (of Nepal), Manipuri and Bodo-Naga (of the northeast) and some
others.
Anyway, while these numerous languages and their dialects developed,
a swelling corpus of literature too formed. A brief introduction to
each follows.
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