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Some scholars consider Sanskrit (ISO 639-3 SAN) to be a “dead” or moribund language. However, Sanskrit has survived as a post-vernacular, second language (L 2 ) for millennia. This is due to its symbolic capital as a perceived language of salvation and liturgy. The stimulus for this paper is the assertion made by several anecdotal news reports that suggest in some remote villages in India “everyone in the village communicates in Sanskrit”, or that “almost all the people always converse in Sanskrit”. These language nests have been established with the assistance of Samskrita Bharati and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Sangh aspires to one day establish the devabhāṣā ‘gods’ language’ as the janabhāṣā ‘people’s language’, then as the rāṣṭrabhāṣā ‘national language’ and, ultimately, as the viśvabhāṣā ‘world language’ or next global lingua franca . This article serves as an entrée to a prospective multi-sited sociolinguistic survey of spoken Sanskrit across North India. The methodology focuses on analysing the encroachment of this prestigious language by identifying sites where Sanskrit is spoken. This will be done so that issues of linguistic vitality, intergenerational transmission, language contact and convergence (including code-mixing and switching, second language acquisition (SLA) and multilingualism) can be explored. This paper focuses on one village, namely Jhiri, which is located in Rajgarh District, Madhya Pradesh. It is suggested in the media that “The 1,000-odd residents of this hamlet, 150 km north of Indore, hardly speak the local dialect, Malvi, any longer. Ten years have been enough for the Sanskritisation of life here” (Ghosh, Aditya. 2008. Sanskrit boulevard . http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/sanskrit-boulevard/article1-339234.aspx (accessed 17 April 2009)). However, even though Sanskrit is spoken in Jhiri this does not necessarily make it a “Sanskrit-speaking village” in the way the media represents it; the actual number of speakers is much less than what the media asserts.

This study summarizes preliminary research into the distribution of morphosyntactic patterns in the languages of South Asia from three different families, above all in eastern-central South Asia, in a first attempt to unravel the linguistic prehistory of this part of the subcontinent. To achieve this goal a small, preliminary morphosyntactic database has been compiled on 29 languages from throughout South Asia based on data from published resources, original field work, as well as questionnaires sent out to researchers working on a number of languages from the region. This data base, although still quite limited, will serve as the starting point for a much larger, finer-grained analysis of languages from throughout the subcontinent which will ultimately contribute substantially to our knowledge of the linguistic prehistory of this region.

The Ladakhi inferential markers /-suk/ ~ /-sok/ and /-tok/ ~ /-tuk/ can be shown to be related to the Old and Classical Tibetan verb ḥdug , originally a lexical verb with the meaning ‘stay, live, sit’. The development of ḥdug into auxiliaries for the opposite evidential values of external direct knowledge (or immediate sense perception) and of indirect knowledge (or inferences) in various modern Tibetic dialects has a parallel in the development of the Classical Tibetan verb snaŋ , originally ‘shine, appear’ into auxiliaries for both direct and indirect knowledge in some Balti and Ladakhi varieties. This parallel development indicates that the dominant factor underlying the choice of the auxiliaries is not a question of sources of knowledge and access channels (evidentiality) but a speaker’s attitude of commitment or non-commitment (admirativity)