“Finding these mixed languages blooming around us, then, is a cause for celebration. What it means is that the little people were able to take on a suitable camouflage while tucking deep into the grammars and sound systems of their new languages precious relics of an earlier life. There is a truly ambidextrous feel to this achievement, one that reaffirms our bond with an older world while asserting our intention to take on the new. The link between Indo-Aryan languages and the Prakrits they got their words from is something dynamic, something negotiated by the little people with the new political entity that they had to face, a group that was not able to snuff out their old languages and hand them down a new operating system, wiping their memory clean of any other traces of their past. In the very forms of the mixed languages we speak, as we go about our daily lives, are encoded unwritten parts of our long, long history.”