The Cosmopolitan Vernacular

Throughout southern asia at different times Starting around 1000, but in most places by 1500, writers turned to the use of local languages for literary expression in preference to the translocal language that had dominated literary expression for the previous thousand years. This development constitutes at the level of culture the single most significant transformation in the region between the creation of one cosmopolitan order at the beginning of the first millennium and another and far different one—through colonialism and globalization—at the end of the second.