The
Eastern Iranian languages are a subgroup of the
Iranian languages emerging in
Middle Iranian times (from ca. the 4th century BC).The
Avestan language is often classified as early Eastern Iranian. The largest living Eastern Iranian language is
Pashto with some 40 million speakers, a major language of
Afghanistan and
Pakistan west of the
River Indus. As opposed to the Middle Western Iranian dialects, the Middle Eastern Iranian preserves word-final syllables.
The living Eastern Iranian languages are spoken in a contiguous area, in
Afghanistan as well as the adjacent parts of western
Pakistan,
Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province of eastern
Tajikistan, and the far west of
Xinjiang region of
China, while it also has two other living members in widely separated areas, the
Yaghnobi language of northwestern
Tajikistan (descended from Sogdian) and the
Ossetic language of the
Caucasus (descended from Scytho-Sarmatian). These are remnants of a vast ethno-linguistic continuum that stretched over most of
Central Asia in the
1st millennium BC.
History
Eastern Iranian is thought to have separated from
Western Iranian in the course of the later 2nd millennium BC, and was possibly located at the
Yaz culture.
With
Greek presence in Central Asia, some of the easternmost of these languages were recorded in their
Middle Iranian stage (hence the "Eastern" classification), while almost no records of the Scytho-Sarmatian continuum stretching from
Kazakhstan west across the
Pontic......
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