The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are composed in a form of Sanskrit that differs from the Paninian norm. Though closely akin to Paninian Sanskrit with which it shares a huge amount of forms and syntactical constructions this is a language of a different type. It does contain frequent violations of the usual Sanskrit rules, affecting phonology, morphology and syntax. These epic peculiarities, however, are not simply a large set of individual cases. By far the greater part of them can be categorized as belonging to one or another of a small number of types, making them amenable to systematic study.