Iranian languages

Iranian languages, subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Iranian languages are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and parts of Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and scattered areas of the Caucasus Mountains.

Linguists typically approach the Iranian languages in historical terms because they fall readily into three distinct categories—Ancient, Middle, and Modern Iranian.

Ancient (Old) Iranian

Of the ancient Iranian languages, only two are known from texts or inscriptions, Avestan and Old Persian, the oldest parts of which date from the 6th century bce. Avestan (an extinct East Iranian language) was probably spoken in northeastern Iran, and Old Persian (an extinct West Iranian language) is known to have been used in southwestern Iran. Other ancient Iranian languages must have existed, and indirect evidence is available concerning some of these. Thus, from the 5th-century-bce historian Herodotus, the Median word for “female dog” (spaka) is known, and a number of Median loanwords have been recognized in the Old Persian inscriptions. In addition, a number of Median personal names are attested in various sources. It is likely that all those languages that are known only from the Middle Iranian period were in fact spoken in a less developed form in the ancient period. It is possible that the same observation applies to some of those modern Iranian languages that are not attested in the earlier periods.

The degree of mutual intelligibility that existed among the ancient Iranian languages is not known with certainty. The differences in the nature of the surviving sources have to be borne in mind. On the one hand, there is the religious poetry of Zoroaster in the Avestan language and, on the other, the official inscriptions of the Achaemenid rulers in Old Persian. Differences in the method of transmission present a further difficulty in the way of direct comparison. Nevertheless, it can safely be stated that the degree of mutual intelligibility must have been much greater between the ancient languages than between the Middle Iranian languages and that those languages geographically closer to each other probably were mutually understood better than those spoken in areas farther apart.

Avestan can hardly be said to be known beyond the ancient period, although only the earliest texts, the Gāthās (short hymns written by Zoroaster), are as old as the 6th century bce, and the later texts represent the language of several subsequent centuries. Old Persian, on the other hand, itself spanning the 6th to the 4th century bce, was continued more or less directly by the various forms of Middle Persian. Even in this case, however, although both Old and Middle Persian represent the language of the royal court, the considerable differences between them remain unexplained.

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Middle Iranian

Middle Persian is known in three forms, not entirely homogeneous—inscriptional Middle Persian, Pahlavi (often more precisely called Book Pahlavi), and Manichaean Middle Persian. The Middle Persian form belongs to the period 300 bce to 950 ce and was, like Old Persian, the language of southwestern Iran. In the northeast and northwest the language spoken was Parthian, which is known from inscriptions and from Manichaean texts. There are no significant linguistic differences in the Parthian of these two sources. Most Parthian belongs to the first three centuries ce.

Middle Persian and Parthian, extinct West Iranian languages, were doubtlessly similar enough to be mutually intelligible, but they differ so greatly from the eastern group of Middle Iranian languages that those must have appeared to be almost foreign languages. The languages of the eastern group, moreover, cannot have been themselves mutually intelligible. The main known languages of this group are Khwārezmian (Chorasmian), Sogdian, and Saka. Less well-known are Old Ossetic (Scytho-Sarmatian) and Bactrian, but from what is known it would seem likely that those languages were equally distinctive. There was probably more than one dialect of each of the languages of the eastern group, although there is certainty only in the case of Saka, for which at least two dialects are clearly attested. The main Saka dialect is known as Khotanese, but a small amount of material survives in a closely related dialect called Tumshuq, formerly known as Maralbashi.

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A few words are known in all of these eastern Iranian languages from as early as the 2nd to the 4th century ce, but substantial evidence begins for Sogdian in the 4th century, for Saka probably no earlier than the 7th century (though that for Tumshuq may be a few centuries older), and for Khwārezmian not until the 12th century and later. The principal evidence for Bactrian belongs to the 2nd century. To the same period belong the Scytho-Sarmatian names of the earliest inscriptions.

All the eastern Iranian languages of the Middle Iranian period were spoken in Central Asia, with the exception of the language of the Scytho-Sarmatian inscriptions from what is now Ukraine, north of the Black Sea. More precisely, Bactrian was spoken in northern Afghanistan and in the adjacent parts of Central Asia. Khwārezmian was the language of Khwārezm, a historic region in present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan but formerly of greater extent. Scholars believe that Sogdian was probably spoken over most of Central Asia, especially in eastern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and western Kyrgyzstan. There were also colonies of Sogdians in various cities along the trade routes to China; in fact, most Sogdian material comes from outside Sogdiana. The Saka dialects, Khotanese and Tumshuq, were spoken in Chinese Turkistan, modern Xinjiang; Tumshuq is the name of a small village in the extreme west of Xinjiang. Khotanese was spoken near the modern city of Hotan (conventional spelling Khotan) on the southern route across the Takla Makan Desert and within about 100 miles (160 km) to the north and to the east of Hotan, where manuscripts have been found, mainly at the sites of former shrines and monasteries.