Sogdian
Extinct languageLanguage Information
Sogdian was spoken in ancient Sogdiana, the region of Samarkand and Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. It is extinct.
Sogdian was an Eastern Iranian language. The Sogdians were the great merchants of the Silk Road, and their language served as a lingua franca across Central Asia as far as China from the 4th to the 10th century A.D. Its script, derived from Aramaic, is the ancestor of the Old Uyghur, Mongolian, and Manchu scripts. A descendant, Yaghnobi, is still spoken in Tajikistan.
Sogdian was an Eastern Iranian language. The Sogdians were the great merchants of the Silk Road, and their language served as a lingua franca across Central Asia as far as China from the 4th to the 10th century A.D. Its script, derived from Aramaic, is the ancestor of the Old Uyghur, Mongolian, and Manchu scripts. A descendant, Yaghnobi, is still spoken in Tajikistan.
- Language Family
- Indo-European
- Subgroup
- Indo-Iranian
- Branch
- Iranian