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Aclassical language is anylanguage with an independent literary tradition and a large body of ancient writtenliterature.[1]
Classical languages are usuallyextinct languages. Those that are still in use today tend to show highlydiglossic characteristics in areas where they are used, as the difference between spoken and written language has widened over time.
In the context of traditional Europeanclassical studies, the "classical languages" refer toGreek andLatin, which were the literary languages of the Mediterranean world inclassical antiquity.
Greek was the language ofHomer and ofclassical Athenian,Hellenistic andByzantine historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to the vocabulary of English and many other European languages, and has been a standard subject of study in Western educational institutions since theRenaissance.Latinized forms of Ancient Greek roots are used in many of the scientific names of species and in other scientific terminology.Koine Greek, which served as alingua franca in the Eastern Roman Empire, remains in use today as a sacred language in someEastern Orthodox churches. Eventually Koine Greek gave rise toMedieval Greek and thenModern Greek.
Latin became the lingua franca of the earlyRoman Empire and later of theWestern Roman Empire. Despite the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the Latin language continued to flourish in the very different social and economic environment of theMiddle Ages, not least because it became the official language of theRoman Catholic Church.
In Western and Central Europe and in parts of northern Africa, Latin retained its elevated status as the main vehicle of communication for the learned classes throughout the Middle Ages and subsequently in theEarly modern period. In the 21st century, Latin is still taught in the United States, mostly in elite private schools.[2]
Latin was not supplanted for scientific purposes until the 18th century, and for formal descriptions inzoology as well asbotany it survived to the later 20th century. The modern internationalbinomial nomenclature holds to this day: taxonomists assign a Latin or Latinized name as the scientific name of eachspecies.
When we realize that an educatedJapanese can hardly frame a single literary sentence without the use of Chinese resources, that to this daySiamese andBurmese andCambodgian bear the unmistakable imprint of the Sanskrit andPali that came in with Hindu Buddhism centuries ago, or that whether we argue for or against the teaching of Latin and Greek [in schools,] our argument is sure to be studded with words that have come to us fromRome andAthens, we get some indication of what early Chinese culture andBuddhism, and classicalMediterranean civilization have meant in the world's history. There are just five languages that have had an overwhelming significance as carriers of culture. They are classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. In comparison with these, even such culturally important languages asHebrew andFrench sink into a secondary position.[3]
In this sense, a classical language is a language that has a broad influence over an extended period of time, even after it is no longer acolloquialmother tongue in its original form. If one language uses roots from another language to coin words (in the way that manyEuropean languages use Greek and Latinroots to devise new words such as "telephone", etc.), this is an indication that the second language is a classical language.[citation needed]
The following languages are generally taken to have a "classical" stage. Such a stage is limited in time and is considered "classical" if it comes to be regarded as a literary "golden age" retrospectively.[citation needed] Thus,Classical Greek is the language of 5th to 4th century BCAthens and, as such, only a small subset of the varieties of theGreek language as a whole. A "classical" period usually corresponds to a flowering of literature following an "archaic" period, such asClassical Latin succeedingOld Latin,Classical Sumerian succeeding Archaic Sumerian,Tamil for its continuous literature,Classical Sanskrit succeedingVedic Sanskrit,Classical Persian succeedingOld Persian. This is partly a matter of terminology, and for exampleOld Chinese is taken to include rather than precedeClassical Chinese. In some cases, such as those ofPersian , the "classical" stage corresponds to the earliest attested literary variant.[4]
Classical Sumerian (literary language ofSumer, c. 26th to 23rd centuries BC)Sumerograms were used inCuneiform even for non-Sumerian texts until the writing system went out of use around the first century AD
Middle English, language ofThe Canterbury Tales, 14th to 15th centuries, with many divergent written dialects, but partially standardized on London speech
^Ramanujan, A. K. (1985),Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil, New York: Columbia University Press. Pp. 329,ISBN0-231-05107-7Quote (p.ix–x) "Tamil, one of the four classical languages of India, is a Dravidian language ... These poems (Sangam literature, 1st century BC to 3rd century AD) are 'classical,' i.e. early, ancient; they are also 'classics,' i.e. works that have stood the test of time, the founding works of a whole tradition. Not to know them is not to know a unique and major poetic achievement of Indian civilization."
^Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008. "Kannada literature" Quote: "The earliest literary work is theKavirājamārga (c. AD 850), a treatise on poetics based on a Sanskrit model."
^"ASSAMESE (অসমীয়া)–THE HISTORY".www.protelostudios.com. 2024-10-24. Retrieved2024-10-23.The Indo-Aryan language in Kamarupa had differentiated by the 7th-century, before it did in Bengal or Orissa.
^Ayyappappanikkar (2025-02-09).Medieval Indian Literature: Surveys and selections. Sahitya Akademi.ISBN978-81-260-0365-5.To find out the written specimens of the Assamese literature, we are to go back to the period of the songs and aphorisms composed by the Buddhist Siddhacharyas between the 8th and the 12th centuries A.D.
^Das, Amitava; Sanyal, Rajat; Chakraborty, Rajib, eds. (2025).Classical Bangla.Kolkata:Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR), Kolkata. p. 386.ISBN9788198479358.The beginning of literary expression in Bengali in the 7th century AD as Caryāpada relates that the language developed over a considerable period before it reached the present status of literary expression in the 7th century. The oral traditions-proverbs, riddles, folks, stories which are the staple of the Bengali culture germinated before the written literature and were handed down from generation to generation. .... Caryāpada, which was composed in the 7th century AD, is the earliest literary expression (discovered so far) in Bengali language. Its composition in the 7th century is proof enough of a thirteen hundred years of ancestry of Bengali language in the written form. .... According to French scholar Sylvain Levi, in 657 A.D. during the period of King Narendra Deb, Matsyendranath who is also known as Mīnanātha according to Näthagitikā, travelled to Nepal. He was the founder and propagator of Nathism and also happens to be the oldest writer in the Bengali language, as has been recognized by many.
^Ogloblin, Alexander K. (2005)."Javanese". In K. Alexander Adelaar; Nikolaus Himmelmann (eds.).The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar. London dan New York: Routledge. pp. 590–624.ISBN9780700712861.
^K. Ramachandran Nair in Ayyappapanicker (1997), p.301
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Beach, Adam R. 2001. "The creation of a classical language in the eighteenth century: standardizing English, cultural imperialism, and the future of the literary canon."Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43, no. 2: 117+.
Coulson, Michael. 1976.Sanskrit: An Introduction to the Classical Language. Sevenoaks, Kent: Hodder and Stoughton.
Crooker, Jill M., and Kathleen A. Rabiteau. 2000. "An interwoven fabric: The AP Latin examinations, the SAT II: Latin test, and the national "standards for classical language learning."The Classical Outlook 77, no. 4: 148–53.
Denizot, Camille, and Olga Spevak. 2017.Pragmatic Approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Eschbach-Szabo, Viktoria, and Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh. 2005. "Chinese as a classical language of botanical science: Semiotics of transcription."Kodikas/Code. Ars Semeiotica: An International Journal of Semiotics 28, nos. 3–4: 317–43.
Gruber-Miller, John. 2006.When Dead Tongues Speak: Teaching Beginning Greek and Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hymes, Robert. 2006. "Getting the Words Right: Speech, Vernacular Language, and Classical Language in Song Neo-Confucian 'Records of Words'."Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 36: 25–55.https://www.jstor.org/stable/23496297.
Koutropoulos, Apostolos. 2011. "Modernizing classical language education: communicative language teaching & educational technology integration in classical Greek."Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 9, no. 3 (2011): 55–69.
Tieken, Herman. 2010. "Blaming the Brahmins: Texts lost and found in Tamil literary history."Studies in History 26, no. 2: 227–43.
Watt, Jonathan M. 2003. "Classical language instruction: A window to cultural diversity."International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities, and Nations 3: 115–24.
Whitney, William Dwight. 1971.Sanskrit Grammar: Including Both the Classical Language, and the Older Dialects, of Veda and Brahmana. 12th issue of the 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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