An ancient Indo-European language, that was studied and "refined" by the ancient grammarians, the most renowned of whom is Panini. It has Vedic, epic, and classical forms and is the language of much of India's literature. Most of the modern north-Indian languages are said to be distant descendants of Sanskrit. The language had no exclusive script in the past. It was written in any convenient phonetic script. Nowadays, many people like to use Devanagari.