Michaël Peyrot’s research focuses on the philology and synchronic linguistics of Tocharian, as well as the prehistory of the Tocharian languages, from both an Indo-European and a language contact perspective. He studied comparative Indo-European linguistics and Tocharian in Leiden and Paris, and edited a large number of Tocharian manuscripts for the International Dunhuang Project of the British Library. He is a contributor of the Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary, and currently carries out research on the Tocharian subjunctive.

"If it is not already, this book will become an essential volume on the desk of researchers of Tocharian B. … solid and convincing … may represent a turning point in Tocharian B studies … It put historical linguistic analyses of B on much firmer footing." – in: Journal of the American Oriental Society 132/3 (2012)"Zusammenfassend lässt sich sagen, dass P[eyrot] in dieser hochbedeutsamen und vollauf gelungenen Arbeit zeigen kann, dass Stumpfs These … zweifellos richtig ist. Alle Studien zu tocharischem Sprachmaterial werden in Zukunft die von P[eyrot] vorgenommene chronologische Einordnung der T[ocharisch-]B-Sprachvarianten und seine Klassifikation der Texte zu berücksichtigen haben." – in: Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 105 (2010), 2"P[eyrot]’s study has greatly expanded our understanding both of the nature of variation within the TB documents and of the relation between the spoken and written languages over a time span of several centuries, far longer than previously assumed … it is noteworthy that the chronology arrived at by P is consistent with the known political and cultural history of the Tarim Basin. … P’s book is an excellent example of corpus research on an extinct language, one where our ignorance of individual writers’ identities and much of the external history forces us to reconstruct a plausible picture of synchronic and diachronic variation on the basis of the texts themselves." – in: LANGUAGE 85/2 (2009)"Zusammenfassend lässt sich sagen: P[eyrot] kann in dieser hochbedeutsamen und vollauf gelungenen Arbeit zeigen kann, dass Stumpfs These … zweifellos richtig ist. Alle Studien zu tocharischem Sprachmaterial werden in Zukunft die von P[eyrot] vorgenommene chronologische Einordnung der T[ocharisch-]B-Sprachvarianten und seine Klassifikation der Texte zu berücksichtigen haben." – in: Kratylos 57 (2012)

• PrefaceAbbreviations Citation codesIntroductionAimMethodVariant formsInterpretationConclusionMapsAppendicesReferencesIndex of Tocharian B word forms