Gāndhārī language
| Gandhari | |
|---|---|
| Region | Gandhāra |
| Era | ca. 1st century CE |
|
Indo-European
|
|
| Kharoṣṭhī | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | None |
Gāndhārī is a modern name (first used by scholar Harold Walter Bailey in 1946) for the language of Kharoṣṭhi texts dating to between the 3rd century BCE and 4th century CE found in the northwestern region of Gandhāra, but it was also heavily used in Central Asia and even appears in inscriptions in Luoyang and Anyang. Gandhari is descended from Vedic Sanskrit or a closely related language.
The Gandhari Prakrit appears on coins, inscriptions and texts, notably the Gandhāran Buddhist texts. It is notable among the Prakrits for having some archaic phonology (some being characteristic of the Dardic languages of the modern region), 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, a unique sister to the Brahmic scripts used by other Prakrits.
Gandhari is a late Middle Indo-Aryan language - a Prakrit - with unique features that distinguish it from all other known Prakrits. Phonetically, it maintained all three Old Indo-Iranian 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. Gandhari 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 (noted by scholars as an underlined 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. The Middle Prakrits typically weakened th to dh, which later shifted to h. The Kharosthi script does not render the distinction between short and long vowels, so the details of that feature are not known.
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