Have you ever met someone who could speak, read and write in Sanskrit?

there are many who can.. and i have met them… i used to study sanskrit in school… but i don’t believe anyone speaks it in daily use

Maybe only Buddhist monks. Many of their documents are in Sanskrit.

Yes. She has a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and teaches Sanskrit classes locally, mostly to Indian-born Americans who want to learn (or want their children to learn) to read the ancient texts and recite the sutras. I was her student for a while. I attended a picnic she hosted for students, where many were speaking Sanskrit to one another at least part of the time. She even led some word games (in Sanskrit) that I could not follow.

Sanskrit, like Latin, is a “dead” language, meaning that it is no one’s mother tongue, or native language. But it is still very much alive among scholars and students. In one of my earliest classes with my teacher, she said that software people—of whom there is a surfeit here in Silicon Valley—had taken an interest in Sanskrit because it is the only language that can be successfully translated by machine. I don’t know if this is true, but I know that she said it. No doubt this translatability would be owing to the regularity and comprehensiveness of Panini’s grammar, compiled in the 4th century B.C., and probably also to the fact that Sanskrit not vernacular and is not still evolving.

My teacher’s native language is Telugu, which she said is the nearest living language to Sanskrit.

I also seem to remember reading (although I’m not seeing it documented on the website) that Sanksrit is taught and spoken in Vedic City, Iowa, a community that grew up around Maharishi University. In 1974 the university purchased the campus of a defunct college in Fairfield, Iowa, for the home of its institution based on the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Some of the main Buddhist texts are not in Sanskrit but in Pali, a Sanskrit derivative.

Yes. At the University of Colorado, I took two separate courses from a professor of Indian heritage who certainly wrote and read Sanskrit. When I Googled her name several years ago, she was known as a scholar of Sanskrit and a translator of ancient texts.

I learned more than I expected from the first course I took from this professor, which is why I took a second in more modern Indian history.

There are still Sanskrit-medium schools in India. Two of my cousins went to such a school until they were 12. Their father is fluent in Sanskrit and a lot of his friends are, too.