Sanskrit is the classical language of Indian and the liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It is also one of the 22 official languages of India. The name Sanskrit means "refined", "consecrated" and "sanctified". It has always been regarded as the 'high' language and used mainly for religious and scientific discourse.

Vedic Sanskrit, the pre-Classical form of the language and the liturgical language of the Vedic religion, is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family. The oldest known text in Sanskrit, the Rigveda, a collection of over a thousand Hindu hymns, composed during the 2nd millenium BC.

Today Sanskrit is used mainly in Hindu religious rituals as a ceremonial language for hymns and mantras. Efforts are also being made to revive Sanskrit as an everyday spoken language in the village of Mattur near Shimoga in Karnataka. A modern form of Sanskrit is one of the 17 official home languages in India.

Since the late 19th century, Sanskrit has been written mostly with the Devanāgarī alphabet. However it has also been written with all of the other alphabets of India, except Gurmukhi and Tamil, and the Grantha, Sharda and Siddham alphabets are used only for Sanskrit.

Since the late 18th century, Sanskrit has also been written with the Latin alphabet. The most commonly used system is the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), which was been the standard for academic work since 1912.

Devanāgarī alphabet for Sanskrit

Vowels and vowel diacritics

Consonants

Conjunct consonants

There are about a thousand conjunct consonants, most of which combine two or three consonants. There are also some with four-consonant conjuncts and at least one well-known conjunct with five consonants.

You can find a full list of conjunct consonants used for Sanskrit at:
http://sanskrit.gde.to/learning_tutorial_wikner/P058.html

Numerals

Sample text in Sanskrit

Transliteration
Sarvē mānavāḥ svatantratāḥ samutpannāḥ vartantē api ca, gauravadr̥śā adhikāradr̥śā ca samānāḥ ēva vartantē. Ētē sarvē cētanā-tarka-śaktibhyāṁ susampannāḥ santi. Api ca, sarvē’pi bandhutva-bhāvanayā parasparaṁ vyavaharantu.

Listen to a recording of this text by Muralikrishnan Ramasamy

Translation

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Thanks to Arvind Iyengar for providing the above sample text.

Sanskrit Translation

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Links

Free Devanagari fonts
http://www.kiranfont.com

Information about the Sanskrit language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit
http://www.sanskrit-sanscrito.com.ar

Online Sanskrit lessons
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/sanskrit/tutor.html
http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/DBLM/olcourse/sanskrit.htm
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/vedol-0-X.html
http://www.elportaldelaindia.com/El_Portal_de_la_India_Antigua/Sánscrito.html

Sanskrit Academy
http://www.samskrtam.org/

Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon
http://webapps.uni-koeln.de/tamil/

Sanskrit Library - contains digitized Sanskrit texts and various tools to analyse them
http://sanskritlibrary.org/

Samskrita Bharati - an organisation established as an experiment in 1981 in Bangalore to bring Sanskrit back into daily life: http://www.samskrita-bharati.org/

American Sanskrit Institute
http://www.americansanskrit.com

Sanskrit Studies
http://www.sanskritstudies.org

Sanskrit Voice - a community of Sanskrit lovers
http://sanskritvoice.com

An archive of Sanskrit dictionaries, readers & grammars in German, English & Russian. (circa 4000 Mb Book Scans, devanagari fonts): http://groups.google.com/group/Nagari

Download free devanagari fonts & transliteration macros. History and hi-res scans of Indian typography: http://nagari.southindia.ru

Free Diwali Cards
http://www.diwali-cards.com
http://www.123diwali.com/

ALPHABETUM is a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient languages that includes Sanskrit, and many other ancient scripts
http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html

Other languages written with the Devanāgarī alphabet

Bhojpuri, Hindi, Konkani, Marathi, Mundari, Nepali, Pali, Sanskrit, Sindhi

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