Spoken Sanskrit in a Gujarat Ashram

Abstract

According to the Indian Census, Sanskrit was spoken by almost fifteen thousand people in 2001. This paper presents the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 2009 in Gujarat, India. The focus of the study was to generate a clearer understanding of the functions of spoken Sanskrit in a multilingual boarding school in Valsad district, southern Gujarat. The goals were to determine the domains in which Sanskrit is spoken, the number of speakers, their level of fluency, and the attitudes of the speakers towards the functionality, future, and prestige of the language. This synchronic study applied typical sociolinguistic methodology of participant observation, reading passage analysis, and interviews to understand more clearly the relevance of speaking Sanskrit