Gandhari language

Gandhārī 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, as opposed 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. 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.

Gandhārī has been linked with members of the modern Dardic language family, including Shina and Kohistani languages.

Rediscovery and history

Initial identification of a distinct language occurred through study of one of the Buddhist āgamas, the Dīrghāgama, which had been translated into Chinese by Zhu Fonian (Chinese: 竺佛念) based on a text read out by Buddhayaśas (Chinese: 佛陀耶舍).

The now dominant hypothesis on the propagation of Buddhism in Central Asia goes back to 1932 when E. Waldschmidt remarked that the names quoted in the Chinese Dīrghāgama (T. 1), which had been translated by the avowedly Dharmaguptaka monk Buddhayaśas (who also translated the Dharmaguptakavinaya), were not rendered from Sanskrit, but from a then undetermined Prākrit also found in the Khotan Dharmapada. In 1946, Bailey identified this Prākrit, which he named Gandhārī, as corresponding to the language of most Kharoṣṭhī inscriptions from Northwestern India.

Available evidence also indicates that the first Buddhist missions to Khotan were carried out by the Dharmaguptaka sect, and used a Kharoṣṭhī-written Gandhārī. However, there is evidence that other sects and traditions of Buddhism also used Gandhārī, and evidence that the Dharmaguptaka sect also used Sanskrit at times.

It is true that most manuscripts in Gandhārī belong to the Dharmaguptakas, but virtually all schools — inclusive Mahāyāna — used some Gandhārī. Von Hinüber (1982b and 1983) has pointed out incompletely Sanskritised Gandhārī words in works heretofore ascribed to the Sarvāstivādins and drew the conclusion that either the sectarian attribution had to be revised, or the tacit dogma "Gandhārī equals Dharmaguptaka" is wrong. Conversely, Dharmaguptakas also resorted to Sanskrit.

Starting in the first century of the common era, there was a large trend toward a type of Gandhārī which was heavily Sanskritised.

Linguistic evidence links some groups of the Dardic languages with Gandhari. The Kohistani languages, now all being displaced from their original homelands, were once more widespread in the region and most likely descend from the ancient dialects of the region of Gandhara. 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. Georg Morgenstierne claimed that Tirahi is "probably the remnant of a dialect group extending from Tirah through the Peshawar district into Swat and Dir." Nowadays, it must be entirely extinct and the region is now dominated by Iranian languages brought in by later immigrations, such as Pashto. Among the modern-day Indo-Aryan languages still spoken today, Torwali, another language within the Dardic subgroup, shows the closest linguistic affinity possible to Niya Prakrit, a dialect of Gandhārī once spoken in Niya (now Xinjiang, China).