Alanic

Alanic was an Eastern Iranian language, descended from the Scytho-Sarmatian dialects of the Pontic steppe and spoken by the Alans from roughly the first to the thirteenth century.

In 409 one branch rode west with the Vandals into Iberia and on to the Maghreb, while the main body settled in the northern Caucasus, where their kingdom survived into the Middle Ages. The Zelenchuk inscription and the report of William of Rubruck show that by the tenth to thirteenth centuries Alanic was being written in a Greek-based alphabet.

After the Mongols overran the Alan state in 1240, its mountain-dwelling descendants became the Ossetians and their language evolved into Ossetian. A related dialect, Jassic, was carried to Hungary by the Jasz in the thirteenth century and survived for two centuries before assimilation.