Few people speak Sanskrit as their first language, 24,821 in the 2011 census, but it has never stopped being used: in daily worship across the world, in scholarship, in new writing, in a daily newspaper since 1970 and in villages where families speak it at home.
The proof
- Census of India 2011: 24,821 people returned Sanskrit as mother tongue, up from 14,135 in 2001.
- Sudharma, a Sanskrit daily, has been published from Mysuru since 1970.
- Sanskrit is one of the 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution.
01A language that never went silent
A dead language is one that no one uses for anything new. Sanskrit fails that test. Every morning, mantras are recited in it at lakhs of homes and temples. Pandits still write shastra commentary and poetry in it, and the Sahitya Akademi gives an award for Sanskrit writing each year. At Mattur in Karnataka’s Shivamogga district, children and shopkeepers greet you in it. The honest picture is a language of learning and worship, spoken at home by few, understood in part by crores, and very much alive.
