Gandhari language

Gandhārī was an Indo-Aryan Prakrit language found mainly in texts dated between the 3rd century BCE and 4th century CE in the region of Gandhāra, located in the northwestern Indian subcontinent. The language was heavily used by the former Buddhist cultures of Central Asia and has been found as far away as eastern China, in inscriptions at Luoyang and Anyang.

Gandhari served as an official language of the Kushan Empire and various central Asian kingdoms, including Khotan and Shanshan. It appears on coins, inscriptions and texts, notably the Gandhāran Buddhist texts. It is notable among the Prakrits for having some archaic phonology, for its relative isolation and independence, for being partially within the influence of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean and for its use of the Kharoṣṭhī script, compared to Brahmic scripts used by other Prakrits.

Gandhārī is an early Middle Indo-Aryan language – a Prakrit – with unique features that distinguish it from all other known Prakrits. Phonetically, it maintained all three Old Indo-Aryan sibilants (s, ś, and ṣ) as distinct sounds, whereas they fell together as [s] in other Prakrits – a change that is considered to be one of the earliest Middle Indo-Aryan shifts. The language also preserves certain Old Indo-Aryan consonant clusters, mostly those involving v and r. In addition, intervocalic Old Indo-Aryan th and dh are written, early on, with a special letter (represented by scholars with an underlined s: [s]), which is later used interchangeably with s – suggesting an early sound-change, likely to the voiced dental fricative ð, and then subsequent shifts to z and, finally, a plain s. Gandhārī has been linked with members of the modern Dardic language family, including Shina and Torwali.

The Middle Prakrits typically weakened th to dh, which later shifted to h. Kharoṣṭhī does not render the distinction between short and long vowels, so details regarding its handling of this feature are not known.