Tajik language

Tajik
Tajiki Persian
Тоҷикӣ (Tojikī), форсии тоҷикӣ (Forsii Tojikī)
"Tojikī" written in Cyrillic script and Perso-Arabic script (Nastaʿlīq calligraphy)
Native toTajikistan
Uzbekistan
RegionCentral Asia
Ethnicity8.0 million Tajiks in Tajikistan (2020)[1]
Native speakers
10.0 million for all countries (8.0 million in Tajikistan 2020)[1]
Dialects
Official status
Official language in
Tajikistan
Recognised minority
language in
Regulated byRudaki Institute of Language and Literature
Language codes
ISO 639-1tg
ISO 639-2tgk
ISO 639-3tgk
Glottologtaji1245
Linguasphere58-AAC-ci
Areas where Tajik speakers comprise a majority shown in dark purple, and areas where Tajik speakers comprise a sizeable minority shown in light purple
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Tajik,[2][a] Tajik Persian, Tajiki Persian,[b] also called Tajiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by Tajiks. It is closely related to neighbouring Dari of Afghanistan with which it forms a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of the Persian language. Several scholars consider Tajik as a dialectal variety of Persian rather than a language on its own.[3][4][5] The popularity of this conception of Tajik as a variety of Persian was such that, during the period in which Tajik intellectuals were trying to establish Tajik as a language separate from Persian, prominent intellectual Sadriddin Ayni counterargued that Tajik was not a "bastardised dialect" of Persian.[6] The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages[7] has political aspects to it.[6]

By way of Early New Persian, Tajik, like Iranian Persian and Dari Persian, is a continuation of Middle Persian, the official administrative, religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC).[8][9][10][11]

Tajiki is one of the two official languages of Tajikistan, the other being Russian[12][13] as the official interethnic language. In Afghanistan, this language is less influenced by Turkic languages and is regarded as a form of Dari, which has co-official language status.[14] The Tajiki Persian of Tajikistan has diverged from Persian as spoken in Afghanistan and even more from that of Iran due to political borders, geographical isolation, the standardisation process and the influence of Russian and neighbouring Turkic languages. The standard language is based on the northwestern dialects of Tajik (region of the old major city of Samarqand), which have been somewhat influenced by the neighbouring Uzbek language as a result of geographical proximity. Tajik also retains numerous archaic elements in its vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar that have been lost elsewhere in the Persophone world, in part due to its relative isolation in the mountains of Central Asia.

  1. ^ a b Tajik at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024) Closed access icon
  2. ^ "Tajik".
  3. ^ Lazard, G. 1989
  4. ^ Halimov 1974: 30–31
  5. ^ Oafforov 1979: 33
  6. ^ a b Shinji ldo. Tajik. Published by UN COM GmbH 2005 (LINCOM EUROPA)
  7. ^ Studies pertaining to the association between Tajik and Persian include Amanova (1991), Kozlov (1949), Lazard (1970), Rozenfel'd (1961) and Wei-Mintz (1962). The following papers/presentations focus on specific aspects of Tajik and their historical modern Persian counterparts: Cejpek (1956), Jilraev (1962), Lorenz (1961, 1964), Murav'eva (1956), Murav'eva and Rubinl!ik (1959), Ostrovskij (1973) and Sadeghi (1991).
  8. ^ Lazard, Gilbert (1975), The Rise of the New Persian Language.
  9. ^ in Frye, R. N., The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 4, pp. 595–632, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  10. ^ Frye, R. N., "Darī", The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Brill Publications, CD version
  11. ^ Richard Foltz, A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East, London: Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2023, pp. 2–5.
  12. ^ "The status of the Russian language in Tajikistan remains unchanged – Rahmon". RIA – RIA.ru. 22 October 2009. Archived from the original on 2 October 2016. Retrieved 30 September 2016.
  13. ^ "В Таджикистане русскому языку вернули прежний статус". Lenta.ru. Archived from the original on 5 September 2013. Retrieved 13 September 2013.
  14. ^ Library, International and Area Studies. "LibGuides: Dari Language: Language History". guides.library.illinois.edu. Retrieved 2024-06-30.


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