Gandhari language

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Gāndhārī 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.^[1] 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.

Gāndhārī 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 where they fell together as [s] in other Prakrits, a change that is considered one of the earliest Middle Indo-Aryan shifts.^[2] Gāndhārī also preserves certain Old Indo-Aryan consonant clusters, mostly those involving v and r.^[3] In addition, intervocalic Old Indo-Aryan th and dh are written early on with a special letter (noted by scholars as an underlined s, [s]), which later is used interchangeably with s, suggesting an early change to a sound, likely the voiced dental fricative ð, and a later shift to z and then a plain s.^[4] It has been linked with members of the modern Dardic language family, including Shina and Torwali.^[5]

The Middle Prakrits typically weakened th to dh, which later shifted to h.^[6] Kharoṣṭhī does not render the distinction between short and long vowels, so the details of that feature are not known.^[7]