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Gāndhārī was an Indo-Aryan Prakrit language found mainly in texts dated between the 3rd century BCE and 4th century CE in the region of Gandhāra, located in the northwestern Indian subcontinent. The language was heavily used by the former Buddhist cultures of Central Asia and has been found as far away as eastern China, in inscriptions at Luoyang and Anyang.
Gandhari served as an official language of the Kushan Empire and various central Asian kingdoms, including Khotan and Shanshan. It appears on coins, inscriptions and texts, notably the Gandhāran Buddhist texts. It 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 Kharosthi script, compared to Brahmic scripts used by other Prakrits.
Gāndhārī 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 – s, ś and ṣ – as distinct sounds where they fell together as s in other Prakrits, a change that is considered one of the earliest Middle Indo-Aryan shifts. Gāndhārī 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 (noted by scholars as an underlined s, s), which later is used interchangeably with s, suggesting an early change to a sound, likely the voiced dental fricative ð, and a later shift to z and then a plain s. It has been linked with members of the modern Dardic language family, including Kohistani Shina and Torwali language.
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 the details of that feature are not known.
Since this time, a consensus has grown in scholarship which sees the first wave of Buddhist missionary work as associated with Gāndhārī and the Kharoṣṭhī script, and tentatively with the Dharmaguptaka sect.
Available evidence also indicates that the first Buddhist missions to Khotan were carried out by the Dharmaguptaka sect, and used a Kharoṣṭhī-written Gāndhārī. However, there is evidence that other sects and traditions of Buddhism also used Gāndhārī, and evidence that the Dharmaguptaka sect also used Sanskrit at times.
Starting in the first century of the common era, there was a large trend toward a type of Gāndhārī which was heavily Sanskritized.
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 language, 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 District and Dir District". 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 language, another language within the Dardic subgroup, shows the closest linguistic affinity possible to Niya Prakrit, a dialect of Gāndhārī once spoken in Niya ruins (now Xinjiang, China).
In Central Asian Gāndhārī, there is often confusion in writing nasals with homorganic stops; it is unclear if this might represent assimilation of the stop or the appearance of prenasalized consonants to the phonetic inventory.
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