The Sanskrit language belongs to which language family?

Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian group, which is part of the large Indo-European language family. This family also includes Latin, Greek, Persian, and most modern European languages such as English, German, French, Spanish and Russian, as well as most North Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali and Marathi.

The relationship between Sanskrit and European languages was famously pointed out in 1786 by Sir William Jones, a British judge in Calcutta and founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784). He observed that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were so similar in their word roots and grammar that they must have come from a common source. For example:

This discovery laid the foundation of comparative linguistics.

Facts about Sanskrit:

• Its oldest form is Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the Rigveda (about 1500-1000 BCE).
• Classical Sanskrit was standardised by the grammarian Panini in his "Ashtadhyayi" (around the 5th-4th century BCE), one of the greatest works of grammar ever written.
• It is usually written in the Devanagari script today, although it has been written in many scripts.
• It is one of the 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule and was declared a classical language of India in 2005.
• It is the second official language of Uttarakhand (2010) and Himachal Pradesh (2019).
• Mattur village in Karnataka is known as a village where Sanskrit is spoken in daily life.
• Famous Sanskrit works include the Vedas, Upanishads, Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the works of Kalidasa such as "Abhijnanashakuntalam" and "Meghaduta".

Why not the other options?

• ✗Dravidian includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
• ✗Sino-Tibetan includes Chinese and Tibetan.
• ✗Afro-Asiatic includes Arabic and Hebrew.