Avestan

Avestan is an ancient Iranian language used to compose the Avesta, the primary sacred scriptures of Zoroastrianism. It is classified within the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian division of the Indo-European language family. The language is mainly known from religious texts and is of great value for comparative Iranian linguistics.

Historically, Avestan is divided into two periods: Old Avestan, also called Gathic Avestan, which includes the Gathas attributed to the prophet Zoroaster and dates to the early first millennium BCE; and Younger Avestan, which comprises the remaining surviving texts such as the Yashts, Visparad, and Vendidad, dating from roughly the late 1st millennium BCE to the early centuries CE.

Writing system: Avestan has its own alphabet, developed in antiquity to render the phonology of Avestan; the letters are used in the traditional manuscripts and are also transcribed in modern scholarship using the Unicode Avestan block. In later eras, many texts circulated in other scripts such as Pahlavi and Pazand for commentary, but the canonical text is preserved in Avestan script.

Speakers today: Avestan is no longer a living language; it survives in liturgical and scholarly contexts among Zoroastrians and in academic studies worldwide, especially in Iran and among the Parsi and Irani communities.

Linguistic significance: Avestan preserves archaic features of Proto-Iranian and provides key data for the development of the eastern Iranian languages. It has a distinctive system of consonants and vowels and a large corpus of hymnic and liturgical vocabulary.