Saka language

• 1. Introduction

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  Saka speakers in the Tarim Basin, in what is now southern Xinjiang, China, called their own language 'Hvatanai'. That name survives today in the word Khotan, one of the ancient Buddhist kingdoms where the language is attested. Saka is also attested in the neighboring kingdoms of Kashgar and Tumshuq, though what survives from each place differs sharply. This documentary follows that language across the Tarim Basin. It asks where its two known dialects came from and what their unusual sounds reveal about their Iranian relatives. It also asks why the language had gone quiet by the eleventh century.

• 2. Two Dialects, One Basin

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  Khotanese and Tumshuqese count as the two known dialects of Saka, each tied to a different Buddhist kingdom in the Tarim Basin. Tumshuqese preserves older sound patterns than Khotanese, making it the more archaic of the pair. Yet it appears in far fewer manuscripts, so linguists understand it far less completely than its Khotan-based cousin.

  Khotanese itself carries a feature rare among Iranian languages. An original Proto-Iranian sound, written ćw, developed into śś there rather than the sp pattern common elsewhere. Sogdian shows some similar patterns, though researchers are unsure whether that reflects a shared origin or coincidental parallel development. Some features of Khotanese are also said to resemble the modern languages Wakhi and Pashto.

  Whether the Indo-Scythians and Western Satraps, Saka rulers in parts of the Indian subcontinent, spoke this same language remains an open question. That traditional assumption has been challenged by more recent research.

• 3. Two Theories Of Origin

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  No invasion of the Tarim Basin appears in Chinese records. Even so, the two dialects of Saka are traditionally linked to a movement of the Scythians. One theory holds that two Saka-speaking tribes settled the region around 200 BC, before Chinese chroniclers began recording events there.

  Michaël Peyrot, writing in 2018, rejects a direct connection between Khotanese and Tumshuqese speakers and a different group the Chinese Hanshu calls 'Saka'. That Hanshu group is recorded as migrating further west in Xinjiang during the 2nd century BC. Instead, Peyrot connects the two dialects to the long-established Aqtala culture, also called Aketala, which had developed in the region since around 1000 BC.

  Khotanese texts are attested mainly between the 7th and 10th centuries, though a handful of fragments date to the 5th and 6th centuries. Material in Tumshuqese resists precise dating, but most of it is thought to belong to the late 7th or the 8th century.

• 4. The Written Record

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  Wood and paper served as writing surfaces for Saka scribes, who adapted the Brahmi script and added new characters over time. One unusual invention was the conjunct ys, used to represent the sound z.

  Khotanese survives in more than 2,300 texts preserved among the Dunhuang manuscripts, while Tumshuqese survives in only 15. Harold Walter Bailey deciphered these documents, opening up a written record that spans the 4th to the 11th century. The earliest layer, from the 4th century, consists mostly of religious material, reflecting the presence of several viharas in the Kingdom of Khotan. Buddhist translations appear at every period the documents cover. Reports submitted to the royal court, called haṣḍa aurāsa, sit alongside private documents and carry real historical weight.

  One inscription from Issyk kurgan has been tentatively identified as Khotanese. It was written in the Kharosthi script, though, rather than the modified Brahmi used elsewhere. Every other surviving document originates from Khotan or Tumshuq itself. Khotanese also left a mark on a neighboring language family: many Prakrit terms passed from Khotanese into Tocharian.

• 5. Silenced By Conquest

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  Saka became extinct once Turkic Muslim invaders had conquered the Kingdom of Khotan, part of a broader wave of Islamicisation and Turkicisation across Xinjiang.

  Writing in the 11th century, the scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari noted that the people of Khotan still kept their own language and script. He added that they did not know Turkic well. Kashgari also recorded that other non-Turkic languages, including Kanchaki and Sogdian, were still spoken in some areas.

  Scholars believe the Saka language group is what Kanchaki belonged to, though that link is inferred rather than proven. It is one loose thread left as the Tarim Basin turned Turkic.