The case study investigates technical terminology and knowledge systems across language varieties and linguistic ecologies within broader processes socio-economic transformation, cultural exchange, and mobility across Eurasia. Combining historical-comparative linguistics, digital philology, and corpus-based approaches, the project examines how vocabularies connected to various technologies (e.g., irrigation, urban planning, extractive technologies) and administration circulated across multilingual environments and became embedded in local and transregional systems of knowledge transmission.

Rather than treating technical terminology as isolated lexical material, the study approaches it as evidence for the exchange of practices, institutions, and communities across interconnected linguistic ecologies shaped by economic exchange, political authority, and religious networks. In close collaboration with philology, archaeology, and environmental history, linguistic data are integrated with textual, material, and ecological evidence to trace semantic change, borrowing patterns, and the diffusion of technological concepts across regions and communities.

Situated within broader questions of connectivity and knowledge circulation, the case study demonstrates how technical vocabularies functioned as infrastructures of transmission linking local expertise with wider systems of exchange. By combining qualitative philological analysis with computational and corpus-based methods, the project shows how micro-level lexical developments illuminate macro-level processes of socio-political transformation, technological transfer, and environmental adaptation, contributing to a more integrated understanding of multilingual knowledge systems in Eurasian history.

The case study examines the Tarim Brahmi writing system within broader processes of cultural exchange, mobility, and knowledge transmission across Eurasia. Building on the project A Database and Digital Paleography of Tarim Brahmi, the study analyzes manuscripts from the Tarim Basin (2nd–10th centuries CE) as material witnesses of multilingual Buddhist and secular textual cultures along the Silk Road.

Tarim Brahmi, a regional adaptation of the Indian Brahmi script, served as the principal medium for Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Tocharian, and Khotanese in monastic and administrative contexts. By integrating paleographic, linguistic, and philological data in a digitally searchable corpus, the project applies both qualitative and computational methods to identify scribal practices, regional writing schools, and diachronic variation.

Situated within EurAsia’s thematic focus on communication networks and multilingualism, this case study demonstrates how writing systems functioned as infrastructures of cultural connectivity. The digital reconstruction of fragmentary manuscripts enables new insights into the circulation of texts, the localization of knowledge, and the entanglement of linguistic communities. Ultimately, Tarim Brahmi provides a model for understanding how micro-level script practices illuminate macro-level transformations in Eurasian history, contributing to a more nuanced account of diversity, mobility, and intellectual exchange.

The case study approaches Tocharian and Khotanese as local languages of the Tarim Basin borderlands embedded in wider networks of connectivity across the Eastern Silk Road. Rather than emphasizing contrast, the study foregrounds their shared function within a stratified linguistic ecology shaped by mobility, religious institutions, and political authority.

Drawing on digital philology and manuscript analysis, the project integrates linguistic, paleographic, and textual data to examine how these languages operated within Buddhist textual cultures and systems of governance. Both Tocharian and Khotanese are attested in manuscript traditions that reflect their role as vehicles of cultural capital, mediating access to religious knowledge, administrative practice, and elite communication. Their use was closely tied to the prestige networks of Buddhist kingship, in which the production, translation, and circulation of texts functioned as markers of legitimacy and authority.

Within this perspective, linguistic diversity in the Tarim Basin emerges not as fragmentation but as a structured feature of interconnected borderland societies. Tocharian and Khotanese exemplify how local language practices were integrated into transregional systems of exchange, contributing to the reproduction of cultural prestige and the articulation of political power along the Silk Road.