| Group | Iranian (with Persian, Kurdish etc.), Northeast Iranian (with Ossetic, Yagnobi etc.) |
| Geography & History | One of the dead East Iranian languages, Sogdian was spoken in ancient Sogdiana, the historical region along the upper Zeravshan river, having the center in Samarkand (then Marakanda). The region named Sogd is mentioned already in Avesta. The oldest documents found date back from the 2nd century. By the 9th and 8th centures AD, when, as Chinese sources state, Sogdiana was powerful enough to control vast territories of east Cetral Asia, the most valuable written documents in Sogdian were created. At this time this language acted as official among many nations of the region. Later Sogdian was assimilated by classic Persian and mostly by languages of Turkish nomadic tribes. |
| Phonetics | Sogdian phonetics showed 5 long and 5 short Indo-European vowels, also 2 pairs of diphthongs (ai, au), had the Indo-European schwa, 19 consonant sounds (while l was used only in loanwords, but absent in original Sogdian words). The ancient combinations *ft, *ht became voiced bd, gd respectively, which was common among some East Iranian dialects. |
| Morphology | The grammar, though simplified by a number of new analytical forms, preserved many archaic features, existing in ancient inflected Indo-European language. The verbal conjugation remained highly inflected. A specific trait of Sogdian was losing or preserving the ending depending on the length of stem vowels and on the number of syllables in the word. |
| Writing | Three varieties of the Sogdian script originate from the Aramaic (West Semitic) alphabets. |
| Close Contacts | The language of Sogdian documents represent the western dialects of the tongue, while the eastern branch gave birth to another Iranian language, Yagnobi, spoken nowadays: its ancestor is not witnessed by written documents. |
| Sample | prwydt' mn' pyd'r yw wydwc 'ync ·
'tšy prqyšt' wyny w'n-cn qw [pty](')y' s'r '' w'n qt sxntnt wysp(w) |
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