Nell’ambito del convegno internazionale su invito “Reconstructing Sogdiana: Archaeological Discoveries and Historical Narratives”, tenutosi nei giorni 11 e 12 aprile a Berkeley ed organizzato congiuntamente dal Tang Center for Silk Road Studies dell’University of California Berkeley, dall’Institute for the Study of the Ancient World della New York University e dal Collège de France, la prof.ssa Chiara Barbati (Università di Pisa), ha portato un contributo dal titolo: The Sogdians: Language, Writing and Social Networks.
Abstract
The contribution aims to demonstrate the need for a paradigm shift in the approach to the Sogdian language on the basis of three premises. The first recalls the very beginnings of linguistics (Antoine Meillet) and reaffirms that language is first and foremost a social phenomenon; the second deals with Sogdian language records in different scripts as ‘Sprachkorpora’ (limited sets of linguistic evidence); the third one focuses on the use of writing, i.e. when, why and what is written in Sogdian in the Central Asian context.
If language is a social phenomenon, Sogdian is the expression of the groups of speakers at a given time within a political confederation, or a religious community, or a commercial network, or a kingdom, or an empire, all circumstances with specific connotations that are reflected in the language we have traces of. Sogdian is not a language with which an empire is identified, nor is it a language subject to one and only one specific linguistic policy, yet in a narrative often set out from the multilingualism of pre-Islamic Iranian empires this has not always emerged distinctly. At least according to the data we have, Sogdian is not even a language that has undergone a process of standardization nor of self-reflection (in the sense of what we would call philosophy of language).
Instead, Sogdian reflects the complexity of the late antique and early Islamic world within the context of the Silk Roads. In this regard, linguistic variation gains another nuance because it is never simply reduced to a dichotomy of high versus low register, or to chronology or space, but is deeply and inextricably linked to the social groups for whom writing is actually a ‘practical’ means of communication.