Eastern Iranian

Eastern Iranian is an areal subgroup of the Iranian languages that emerged during the Middle Iranian era, roughly the fourth century BC to the ninth century AD, and unlike Western Iranian dialects of the same period it preserved word-final syllables. Its largest living member by far is Pashto, spoken by 40 to 60 million people across Afghanistan and Pakistan, followed by Ossetic, with around 600,000 speakers in the Caucasus; historical members include the now-extinct Bactrian and Sogdian, and the modern Pamir languages of Afghanistan, Tajikistan and neighboring regions also belong here. The subgroup is a remnant of a once much larger Central Asian linguistic continuum that stretched across the region in the first millennium BC.