HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Middle Indic (or Prākrit) is the designation for a range of Indo-Aryan languages displaying characteristic phonological and grammatical developments from Old Indic (i.e., Sanskrit, see Ch. 2). Like Sanskrit they belong to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family and are directly attested beginning in the latter part of the first millennium BC and through the first millennium AD. Middle Indic is not strictly a chronological term, but rather refers to logical stages of linguistic development. Some of the defining characteristics of Middle Indic phonology are found already in lexical items in the oldest Sanskrit text, the Rig-veda, and Middle Indic languages are attested alongside Sanskrit for all of their history. The alternate designation, Prākrit, means “natural, unrefined,’ hence “vernacular,” as opposed to saṃskr̥ta- “perfected,” applied to the prescriptive, rule-governed Classical Sanskrit of the grammarians. As well as sometimes designating all Middle Indic speech forms, Prākrit is often used in the narrow sense to refer to a subset of these languages. This latter usage will be followed here.

In the following sections, we will enumerate the various Middle Indic languages and describe the evidence for them.

Inscriptions

Though forms showing characteristic Middle Indic sound changes are found in our earliest Vedic Sanskrit text, no Middle Indic languages are directly attested until the third century BC. At this time appear the earliest inscriptional records of any Indo-Aryan languages, the inscriptions of the Buddhist Mauryan emperor Aśoka (Aś.).