What is "vedic sanskrit"

Vedic Sanskrit is an Old Indo-Aryan language. It is the spoken ancestor of liturgical Sanskrit, and an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Aryan. It is closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved of the Iranian languages. Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest attested language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages.

Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, texts compiled over the period of early-to-mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE. It was orally-preserved as a part of the Śrauta tradition of Vedic chanting, predating the advent of alphabetic writing in India by several centuries. For lack of both epigraphic evidence and an unbroken manuscript tradition, Vedic Sanskrit is one of the languages that cannot be translated accurately in this age. Especially the oldest stage of the language, Rigvedic Sanskrit, the language of the hymns of the Rigveda, is preserved only in a redacted form several centuries younger than the texts' composition. Recovering its original form is a matter of linguistic reconstruction.

From about the 4th century BCE, in the classical period of Iron Age India, Vedic Sanskrit gave way to Classical Sanskrit as defined by the grammar of .