Sant Bhasha (

Gurmukhi Gurmukhī ( , Shahmukhi: ) is an abugida developed from the Laṇḍā scripts, standardized and used by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad (1504–1552). Commonly regarded as a Sikh script, Gurmukhi is used in Punjab, India as the official scrip ...

: ਸੰਤ-ਭਾਸ਼ਾ; ''Sant Bhāṣā''; ) is a liturgical and scriptural language composed of vocabulary common to northern Indian languages, which was extensively used by saints and poets to compose religious verses. It can be understood by readers with a background in either Punjabi,

Hindi Modern Standard Hindi (, ), commonly referred to as Hindi, is the Standard language, standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of India, official language of the Government ...

Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...

and its dialects.

Features

Sant Bhasha is notable for its high usage of inherited ''

tadbhava (Sanskrit: तद्भव, , lit. "arising from that") is the Sanskrit word for one of three etymological classes defined by native grammarians of Middle Indo-Aryan languages, alongside tatsama and deśi words. at pp. 67-69. A "tadbhava" is ...

'' vocabulary in-comparison to Sanskritic ''

tatsama Tatsama ( , lit. 'same as that') are Sanskrit loanwords in modern Indo-Aryan languages like Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Hindi, Gujarati, and Sinhala and in Dravidian languages like Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. They generally ...

'' borrowings.

In Sikhism

Painting of Guru Arjan being fanned with a book before him

Sant Bhasha is most prominently used in the central Sikh scripture, the

Guru Granth Sahib The Guru Granth Sahib (, ) is the central holy religious scripture of Sikhism, regarded by Sikhs as the final, sovereign and eternal Guru following the lineage of the ten human gurus of the religion. The Adi Granth (), its first rendition, w ...

. The languages used include Punjabi and its dialects,

Lahnda Lahnda (; , ), also known as Lahndi (Lahanda, Lahinda) or Western Punjabi, is a group of north-western Indo-Aryan language varieties spoken in parts of Pakistan and India. It is defined in the ISO 639 standard as a " macrolanguage" or as a "s ...

, regional

Prakrit Prakrit ( ) is a group of vernacular classical Middle Indo-Aryan languages that were used in the Indian subcontinent from around the 5th century BCE to the 12th century CE. The term Prakrit is usually applied to the middle period of Middle Ind ...

s, Apabhramsa,

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

, Hindustani languages ( Brajbhasha, Bangru, Awadhi,

Old Hindi Old Hindi, also known as Khariboli, was the earliest stage of the Hindustani language, and so the ancestor of today's Hindi and Urdu. It developed from Shauraseni, and was spoken by the peoples of the region around Delhi, in roughly the 10th–1 ...

, Deccani), Bhojpuri, Sindhi, Marathi, Marwari, Bengali, Persian, and

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

. While vocabulary from all of these languages is used, Sant Bhasha is only written in the Gurmukhi script.Sikhism. The Guru Granth Sahib (GGS)
By Harjinder Singh. "The Guru Granth Sahib also contains hymns which are written in a language known as Sahiskriti as well as Sant Bhasha, it also contains many Persian and Sanskrit words throughout."

Notes

References

{{reflist Indo-Aryan languages Languages of India Sikh culture

Features

In Sikhism

See also

Notes

References