Sacian is distinguished from other Iranian tongues by its archaic grammar. Seven noun cases were seldom at this time among the ytongues of the group, as well as two verb voices: active and medium. The past tense also had two different types of conjugating the verb. Sacian vocabulary borrowed many words and terms from Buddhist Sanskrit terminology. In texts two dialects can be distincted: a more archaic and a more analytic ones, with the later reducing of inflections.
Sacian texts were written in a variant of late Brahmi and date back to 9th and 10th centuries. Besides Khotanese, Sacian includes several minor dialectal groups which are represented by a very poor number of sources. They were spoken in Kashgar, Tumshuk and other East Turkestan oasises.
