History and Development of Prakrit Languages and Dialects
What this domain tests
Origin and family history of Prakrit, the named dialects and their regions, and the grammarians who described them.
Place in the family
Prakrit is Middle Indo-Aryan, descended from Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic and classical Sanskrit) and ancestral to Apabhraṁśa and the New Indo-Aryan languages. The name derives from prakṛti ‘natural, original’, contrasted with saṁskṛta ‘refined’. Prakrit is not ‘broken Sanskrit’ but a parallel natural development.
Chronology (approximate)
- Old Indo-Aryan: 1500–600 BCE
- Middle Indo-Aryan: c. 600 BCE–1000 CE (Prakrit, then Apabhraṁśa)
- New Indo-Aryan: from c. 1000 CE
The literary Prakrits
- Māhārāṣṭrī - western Deccan; language of lyric poetry and kāvya
- Śaurasenī - Śūrasena/Mathurā region; prose and drama
- Māgadhī - Magadha; speech of low-status characters in Sanskrit drama; r > l
- Ardhamāgadhī - ‘half-Māgadhī’, the Jain canon language
- Paiśācī - known mainly from citations of Guṇāḍhya’s Bṛhatkathā
- Jain Māhārāṣṭrī and Apabhraṁśa - later literary media
Grammarians
Vararuci’s Prākṛtaprakāśa, Hemacandra’s Siddhahemaśabdānuśāsana (12th century), Mārkaṇḍeya’s Prākṛtasarvasva; modern descriptions by Pischel and Woolner.
Traps
Equating Ardhamāgadhī with Māgadhī; dating Prakrit after Sanskrit drama rather than alongside it; treating Apabhraṁśa as a Prakrit dialect rather than the next stage.