The Bactrian language is an extinct language which was spoken in the Central Asian region of Bactria, also called Tocharistan , in northern Afghanistan. Linguistically, it is classified as an Iranian language, belonging to the Indo-Iranian languages sub-familly 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 writen 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.

See also

• Tocharian languages