South Asian Studies: Languages

Cambridge University’s Digital Library hosts a selection of digitized manuscripts in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Tamil, and other ancient and medieval South Asian languages pertaining to Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious traditions.

This website is an online resource for Gandhari, a northwestern Middle Indo-Aryan language closely related to Sanskrit and Pali attested in use from the third century BCE to the fifth century CE. Gandhari.org provides resources for those engaged in the study of the Gandhari language, including a dictionary, bibliography, and catalog of Gandhari texts around the world.

GRETIL is the Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages, which also contains related Indological materials from Central and Southeast Asia. GRETIL is a resource platform providing standardized machine-readable texts in Indian languages that have been contributed by various individuals and institutions. In particular, this resource provides online access to many e-texts in Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Old Javanese, and Tibetan.

The Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts, or PANDiT, is a digital humanities project whose task is to create a database for the vast world of South Asian letters. PANDiT seeks to store, curate, and share reliable data on works, people, places, institutions, and manuscripts from premodern South Asia, in addition to relevant secondary sources, and to do so across periods, languages, disciplines and subject matter.

Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (DDSA) is part of the University of Chicago’s Digital South Asia Library. DDSA aims to make available the highest quality electronic dictionaries for South Asian languages as free public services via the internet. DDSA encompasses languages of the current nation-states of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Dictionaries are available in the following languages: Assamese, Baluchi, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Khowar, Lushai, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Pali, Panjabi (Punjabi), Pashto (Pushto), Persian, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and comparative dictionaries across multiple languages.

Launched in April 2000, to record the voices of South Asian authors for the Library of Congress' Archive of Recorded World Literature, the project has captured the readings of prominent South Asian poets, novelists, and playwrights. The authors recorded so far represent more than fifteen of the languages of India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Ethnologue gives you insight into each of the world’s nearly 7,500 known languages — whether used daily by over a billion people or existing only as a memory of cultural heritage. The documented number is in constant flux because languages are living and dynamic. They constantly evolve as the communities that use them are shaped and influenced by our rapidly changing world.

ScriptSource is a dynamic, collaborative reference to the writing systems of the world, with detailed information on scripts, characters, languages - and the remaining needs for supporting them in the computing realm.

A cooperative project among participating libraries to provide browsable tables of contents of journals in South Asian languages. Contributing libraries include Center for Research Libraries, Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Library of Congress Field Office Islamabad, Princeton University, University of California Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas, University of Washington and Yale University.