Tokarian

Tokarian is a term that may refer to the Tocharians, an ancient people who inhabited the Tarim Basin in what is today Xinjiang, China, and to their languages. In some older or alternate transliterations, Tokarian is used as the spelling for these subjects.

In linguistics, the Tocharian languages (also sometimes spelled Tocharian or Tokharian in early sources) comprise Tocharian A and Tocharian B. They are an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. The extant evidence comes from manuscripts dating roughly from the 6th to the 8th centuries CE discovered in the Tarim Basin.

Historically, the Tocharians lived along the northern rim of the Tarim Basin and interacted with neighboring groups along the Silk Road, including Sogdian and Chinese polities. The ethnonym derives from classical sources such as the Greek Tochai; modern scholarship standardizes the term "Tocharian" to refer to both the people and their languages. The name Tokarian appears as a variant in some sources, reflecting transliteration differences rather than a distinct linguistic or ethnic entity.

Modern usage predominantly uses Tocharian; Tokarian is seldom used in contemporary linguistic literature, except in historical discussions or to reflect earlier spellings.

See also: Tocharian languages; Tarim Basin; Silk Road; Tocharians (ethnonym).