The is an extinct language which was spoken in the
Central Asia n region of
Bactria , also called
Tocharistan , in northern
Afghanistan . Linguistically, it is classified as an
Iranian Language , belonging to the
Indo-Iranian Languages sub-family of
Indo-European Languages .
Bactrian was probably spoken by the local populations of Bactria when
Alexander The Great invaded the area around
323 BCE , inaugurating a two-century period of
Hellenistic rule by the
Seleucid Empire and the then the
Greco-Bactrian Kingdom .
Greek rule ended around
123 BCE with the invasions of the
Yuezhi from the North, who adopted the Greek alphabet to write the local Bactrian language, a case which is unique among Iranian languages. Before that time, Bactrian was written in the
Aramaic Alphabet .
Bactrian seems to have been, together with Greek, the official language of the
Kushans , descendant of the Yuezhi, and was used in their coins and inscriptions. The territorial expansion of the Kushans helped propagate Bactrian to Northern
India and parts of
Central Asia , as far as
Turfan when
Buddhist and
Manichean inscription in Bactrian can be found.
In general, Bactrian phonetics seems to share features with modern
Pashto , modern
Persian and in Middle Iranian tongues like
Parthian and
Sogdian .
Remains of the language are found as late as the 9th century CE.
