OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF SANSKRIT 63 the present time a considerable and essential part of the vocabulary of these languages is Sanskrit. In the Tamil country of the extreme South Indo-Aryan influ- ence was weakest. Tamil was the earliest Dravidian language to be used for literary purposes, and it was to begin with com- paratively free from Aryan influence. In the later period the influence of Sanskrit increases, but never on the scale that is found in its two northern neighbours. Ceylon received its Aryan language through colonisation from Northern India. In addition Buddhism established Pali as a literary language. At a later period still the cultivation of San- skrit was introduced, at some periods on quite an extensive scale. The spread of Buddhism was responsible for the introduction of Indo-Aryan linguistic influence into large regions of Central Asia. At one time a form of Prakrit served as the administra- tive language of the kingdom of Kroraina in Chinese Turkestan. Buddhist Sanskrit texts were current over a wide area, and works long lost in India have been recovered in recent years in Central Asia. Under Buddhist influence the native languages of this area began to be cultivated, notably the Iranian Khotanese, and the two closely related Indo-European languages which go by the name of Tocharian. The vocabulary of these draws abundantly on Sanskrit or Prakrit sources. On the other hand Tibetan which became Buddhist from the seventh century on- wards resisted foreign linguistic influence, and by what must have been a considerable tour de force , the whole Buddhist vocabulary was rendered into native Tibetan. This had been done at an earlier period by the Chinese where differences of script and language rendered any other course impracticable. The influence of Sanskrit was equally extensive in countries to the East and South-East. In Burma there is early evidence of the influence of Sanskrit Buddhism. This was replaced (a.d. eleventh cent.) by a religious reformation which estab- lished Theravada Buddhism as the official religion and with it Pali as the language of religion. Further East there were Hindu colonies in South Siam (Dvaravatl), Cambodia (Kambuja) and Annam (Campa). Abundant Sanskrit inscriptions dating from the third century A.D. onwards remain to show the importance of Sanskrit in these areas, and its influence was felt on the native languages when they came to be cultivated. Even
