Knox Hall 207

‘And the people of Hellfire speak Bukharan’: A sociolinguistic perspective on the Middle Iranian languages in the Islamic period

Adam Benkato

This paper, drawn from parts of two projects in progress (on the social history of the Sogdian language, and on Chorasmian texts in Arabic script), surveys the later stages of the Middle Iranian languages Bactrian, Chorasmian, Parthian, and Middle Persian. Although the coming of Islam to these language areas in Iran and Central Asia (late 7th/early 8th c.) is often thought of as a rupture in the transmission of Middle Iranian languages and literatures, evidence from Iranian textual corpora as well as Arabic reports suggests that a different perspective is needed. Bringing a sociolinguistic approach to bear on this evidence helps revise our understanding of the later stages of these languages and shed light on their fate at the end of Late Antiquity and the early Islamic period. In particular, this paper is interested in uncovering how the Middle Iranian languages ceased, or didn’t cease, to be written; what happened to people trained to use those languages in official settings; and finally, tracing the contours of the sociolinguistic landscape of early Islamic Iran and Central Asia.

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