Migrants and Men: How They Shaped Language in India

Mohan’s talk will look at the two stages of Sanskrit: the first stage being the entry of the Vedic tribes and clans over generations, Sanskrit and the languages that were known as Prakrits. The second stage is their expansion across North India and down into Maharashtra about 700 years later, which led to the evolution of the modern ‘Indo Aryan’ languages. In the fusion that made these languages, we get glimpses of the older languages that were spoken before the arrival of the Vedic people, and which have since been lost. Mohan also brings insights from the development of the Creole languages of the Caribbean to make sense of these developments.
Peggy Mohan, Writer, and Author, with an introduction by Veneta Dayal, Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics Yale University