Prakrit is one of the most significant classical languages of India, “a language without a people and without a place,” and, certainly, as Andrew Ollett puts it, “the most important language you've never heard of” (pp. 3, 14). Language of the Snakes—a title taken from Mīrzā Khān's remark describing Prakrit as nāg-bānī in his seventeenth-century grammar of Braj Bhāṣā in Persian—is a landmark study of why and how this particular language occupies the role it does in the “language order” of ancient and medieval India.

Ollett explores in seven chapters how Prakrit (often incorrectly conflated with the entire range of Middle-Indic languages, between Vedic Sanskrit and the modern vernaculars) fits in a historical narrative often dominated, in the first millennium CE, by Sanskrit and then, throughout the second millennium and into the modern period, by the numerous regional literary languages of premodern India. While offering careful analyses of some...

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