Oxford University Press (OUP) announced the launch of its trilingual Sanskrit-Hindi-English dictionary containing 25,000 words. It was published in collaboration with Uttar Pradesh Sanskrit Sansthanam, an educational institution in Lucknow that aims to promote, preserve, and develop the ancient Sanskrit language and culture.
The dictionary is in line with the importance of language learning for cultural development and empowerment of the local language through its three-language formula. Moreover, this dictionary reflects the Indian Ministry of Education’s policy for strengthening development and national unity.
An OUP spokesperson told Cherwell, “Trilingual and bilingual dictionaries are extremely important in countries or regions where students or learners are multilingual, and learning a new language through the scaffolding for more than one language known to them.”
Linguists have suggested that Sanskrit and many European languages can be traced to Proto-Indo-European, a common ancestor connecting diverse language families. Thus the study of Sanskrit’s development and connections provides insight into international language evolution, exchanges between cultures, and patterns of migration.
With 25,000 words, the dictionary’s goal is that every Sanskrit student can be conversational and fluent in a decade. OUP continued: “Sanskrit is important to Indian culture as it is widely used in religious literature, and most modern Indian languages are directly derived from, or strongly influenced by it.”
The managing director of Oxford University Press (OUP) India, Sumanta Datta, said: “Oxford University Press is dedicated to the preservation and enrichment of languages, fostering a global commitment to linguistic diversity, and knowledge dissemination. This trilingual dictionary represents a significant milestone in our commitment to promoting language learning and our cultural heritage”.
In her remarks, Datta also referred to the 2020 National Education Policy (NEP), which promotes the acquisition of at least three languages as a key curriculum goal, two of which must be native to India. While the attainment of two languages native to India has been an aim of the Ministry of Education since 1968, previously, Hindi-speaking states were encouraged to learn southern states’ languages, and vice versa.
