Book excerpt: India's natural wealth, knowledge, arts and crafts have attracted foreigners throughout its long history. It has had continuous cultural contact and trade with other countries and, in all this, India has been exposed to many foreign languages such as Arabic, Bactrian, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Portuguese, Turkish and in a certain sense, Sanskrit. Each of these languages went through a cycle, rising to the position of power and prestige, and eventually declining and yielding place to yet another language. In this process, all these languages interacted with the native languages of India and exchanged sounds, words, sentences, idioms and expressions, sometimes even giving birth to new languages. Foreigners and Foreign Languages in India: A Sociolinguistic History tells the story of this long and continuous history of the advent, learning, use, demise and debris of some foreign languages in India.