TRACING VEDIC DIALECTS - People.fas.harvard.edu

§ 1. INTRODUCTION
It is believed, and quite generally so, that the Vedic language had no
dialects. One usually admits that the archaic poetic language of the Ṛgveda is
a mixture of many dialects which had influenced each other. On the other
hand, the educated speech of post-Ṛgvedic times, found in the prose texts, the
so-called Brāhmaṇas, is regarded as the contemporary, the living language of
the priests and other well-educated men, while the rest of the population
spoke various degrees of early Middle-Indian, i.e., archaic Prākṛts. But this is
as far as one will go. 1 My contention will be that even this standard North
Indian Koine, "Vedic," which does not seem to have regional variations
at all, shows traces of the local dialects-- if only one looks carefully enough.
Until now, this has not been done, chiefly because the language is apparently
uniform in all the texts. There are, as has been noted from time to time, a few
words or phrases, like the famous ŚB quotation, he 'lavo he 'lavo, spoken by
the Asuras, which is believed to be from an early Eastern 'Prākṛt' for: he
(a)rayaḥ. 2
But otherwise, the sound system and even the phonetical variants of one
particular phoneme are the same, the Sandhis show little variation, the forms
of the noun and verb system seem to be the same throughout the texts, and
the same applies to the syntax.
If there are "Vedic Variants," they are usually attributed to matters of style
or described as late (or post-Vedic) influence of Prākṛt on the Vedic texts. 3
Actually, this does not, if one reads the texts carefully, agree with the
testimony of the Vedic texts themselves; there are a number of very clear
statements indicating that the Vedic people noticed and thought about
regional differences in speech:
1 F.Edgerton, Dialectic phonetics in the Veda: Evidence from the Vedic variants, in Studies
in honour of Hermann Collitz, Baltimore (The John Hopkins Press), 1930, p.25-36; -
M.B.Emeneau, The dialects of Old Indo-Aryan, in: Ancient Indo-European dialects, ed.
H.Birnbaum and J. Puhvel, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1966, p. 123-138.
2 Thieme, Pāṇini and the Veda, notes the closeness of Pāṇ.'s bhāṣā and KS, see p. 17,76,80;
cf. below, ann. 65, 239, 280; cf. now Cardona, Pāṇini. A survey of research, Delhi 1980,
p.238 sq.
3 Bloomfield-Edgerton, Vedic Variants, treat only the Mantras belonging to the so-called
Mantra language, see below § 4.2.2; cf. Oertel, Kasusvariationen, SB Aakd. München 1937-
1939. Especially Renou and Caland regarded many of the variations in grammar to be
treated below, as mere variations in the style of Vedic viz. of the various Vedic schools.
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