entirely extinct and the region is now dominated by Iranian languages brought in by later migrants, such as Pashto. Among the modern day Indo-Aryan languages still spoken today, Torwali shows the closest linguistic affinity possible to Niya, a dialect of Gāndhārī. Phonology In general terms, Gāndhārī is a Middle Prakrit, a term for middle-stage Middle Indo-Aryan languages. It only begins to show the characteristics of the Late Prakrits in the 1st century of the Common Era. The Middle Prakrit phonetic features are the weakening of intervocalic consonants: degemination and voicing, such as the shift of OIA *k to g. The most rapid loss was the dentals, which started to disappear completely even before the late period as with *t > ∅ as in *pitar > piu; in contrast, retroflex consonants were never lost. There is also evidence of the loss of a distinction between aspirates and plain stops as well, which is unusual in the Indo-Aryan languages. In Central Asian Gāndhārī, there is often confusion in writing nasals with homorganic stops; it is unclear if this might represent assimilation of the stop or the appearance of prenasalized consonants to the phonetic inventory. Grammar Gāndhārī grammar is difficult to analyse; endings were eroded not only by the loss of final consonants and cluster simplification of all Prakrits but also by the apparent weakening of final vowels "'to the point that they were no longer differentiated'". Nonetheless, there was still at least a rudimentary system of grammatical case. Verbal forms are highly restricted in usage due to the primary usage of longer texts to translations of religious documents and the narrative nature of the sutras but seem to parallel changes in other Prakrits. Lexicon The lexicon of Gāndhārī is also limited by its textual usage; it is still possible to determine unusual forms, such as Gāndhārī forms that show commonalities with forms in modern Indo-Aryan languages of the area, notably some groups of the Dardic languages. An example is the word for sister, which is a descendant of Old Indo-Aryan svasṛ- as in the Dardic languages, whereas all the Indo-Aryan languages have replaced that term with reflexes of bhaginī. Rediscovery and history Initial identification of a distinct language occurred through study of one of the Buddhist āgamas, the Dīrghāgama, which had been translated into Chinese by Buddhayaśas () and Zhu Fonian (). Since this time, a consensus has grown in scholarship which