Gandhari language

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.

[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] The Middle Prakrits typically weakened th to dh, which later shifted to h.[5] Kharoṣṭhī does not render the distinction between short and long vowels, so the details of that feature are not known.

[10][11] The last to disappear was Tirahi, still spoken some years ago in a few villages in the vicinity of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, by descendants of migrants expelled from Tirah by the Afridi Pashtuns in the 19th century.

[12] Georg Morgenstierne claimed that Tirahi is "probably the remnant of a dialect group extending from Tirah through the Peshawar district into Swat and Dir".

[12] Among the modern day Indo-Aryan languages still spoken today, Torwali shows the closest linguistic affinity possible to Niya, a dialect of Gāndhārī.

[15]Since this time, a consensus has grown in scholarship which sees the first wave of Buddhist missionary work as associated with Gāndhārī and the Kharoṣṭhī script, and tentatively with the Dharmaguptaka sect.

From 1994 on, a large number of fragmentary manuscripts of Buddhist texts, seventy-seven altogether,[26] were discovered in eastern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan.