Individual humans as well as human communities interact in a great variety of ways and, in essence, Unesco's Silk Roads Major Project endeavors to shed light on the cultural interactions along the trade routes linking various Eurasian civilizations. The term Silk Road or Roads conjures up visions of caravans laden with rare goods, carrying them from the distant, perhaps even the so-called “mysterious”, East towards the Western World. This general impression is partially created by the word “silk”, name of a commodity generally and correctly linked with China where it was first produced. It is good to remember that a “Silk Road” is a historic fiction, invented in the nineteenth century by the German geographer von Richthofen to call attention to the existence of, first and foremost, commercial contacts between China and the Roman Empire. Silk was but one of the many goods circulating all along the many roads criss-crossing the great Eurasian space. This short essay will provide some information on the languages used along the land arteries of communication between East and West.

Even though the languages that are spoken and written in the territories crossed by commercial and cultural routes between Asia and Europe - the “Silk Roads” - have been the object of research for many decades, the popular notion of “languages along the Silk Road” is of fairly recent origin. It is worth giving some thought to the problem of whether, or to what extent, it is actually possible and practical to continue with linguistic research in the context of the “Silk Roads.”

The Silk Road, which began operating more than two thousand years ago, constituted certainly for many centuries the main cultural and linguistic highway between peoples of the East and peoples of the West, and to an even greater extent between the peoples of the East or West and those living along the Silk Road in Central Asia. This is reflected by the many loan words transmitted along the Silk Road from one end to the other, especially those connected with the textile trade.

This inquiry will be limited to an analysis of Turkic borrowings that have been attested in inscriptions found in Mongolia and southern Siberia in the period beginning around the year 700 A.D., as well as in Turkic-Uighur manuscripts, beginning around the year 900 A.D., conserved in northern Tarim (especially in the Turfan region) and in Dunhuang, which is a Chinese outpost on the main road of the silk trade. We will look only at borrowings that predate Islamization, a process that developed rapidly during the eleventh century and of which some borrowings are still part of the language of the Islamic Turkish world. Although most of our study will concentrate on pre-Islamic borrowings that were fully assimilated into written words, we will will also investigate some transcriptions of foreign terms that are mentioned in various manuscripts of a theological bent (most notably of Indian, Iranian, Chinese, and Syriac origin and found in Buddhist, Manichaean, and Nestorian Christian texts) as well as words of a very technical nature. We will also look at more contemporary terms that are derived from several major semantic fields.

The Old Turkish inscriptions that were written roughly between the beginning of the eighth and the middle of the ninth century A.D. and represent the first testimonies of a Turkish language, include important information about contacts of the ruling Türks and later the Uighurs, who were also Turkish-speaking, with other peoples inside and outside of their el, i.e., their steppe empire. This information is partly explicit, when, for example, we read about a delegation being sent to the other side, and partly implicit, by which we mean outside influences that we can trace in the texts in different ways.

The present-day languages and language situation of the Silk Road regions of Central Asia reflect the consequences of the former use of many different languages and the multilingual trading along these routes, as demonstrated by the existence today of a number of hybridized languages whose emergence may in part be attributable to the trading activities on the Silk Road. These languages have, until very recently, received little attention, if any, by linguistic scholars. It has been mainly through the large Language Atlases project mentioned in note 1 below that interest has become focused on them.

The expansion of commerce between the Chinese and Persian states, and the re-establishment of caravan routes, helped make possible the arrival of the first Manichaean missionaries to China in the seventh century of our era. Thus, in 694, a Persian with the title of fuduodan appeared before the Chinese court carrying “the false religion contained in The Book of the Two Principles,” Erzongjing. In 719 another Manichaean dignitary, bearing the title of muzhu and versed in astronomy, was sent to the Chinese emperor by the viceroy of Tokharestan. Some twenty years later, on 16 Jul, 731, a Manichaean Bishop, also called a fuduodan, completed the Compendium of the Doctrines and Rules of the Religion of Mani, the Buddha of Light. The resulting edict, which required the translation of this work, was designed to allow the Chinese authorities both to obtain a complete overview of Manichaeism and to indicate what attitude to take in its regard. Accordingly, the next year (732), an edict was promulgated which, while condemning Manichaeism, granted religious freedom to its non-Chinese adherents.