Tajiks

For other uses, see Tajiks (disambiguation).

Tajiks
Тоҷикон
تاجيکان
Tajiks
Total population
c. 19–26 million
Regions with significant populations
 Afghanistan8-15 million (2024)[1] [2]
 Tajikistan~8,700,000 (2024)[3] [4]
 Uzbekistan
    		~1,700,000 (2021)[5]
other, non-official, scholarly estimates are 6-7 million[6][7]
 Russia350,236[8]
 Kyrgyzstan58,913[9]
 United States52,000[a]
 Kazakhstan50,121[11]
 China39,642[12]
 Ukraine4,255[13]
Languages
Persian (Dari and Tajik)
Secondary: Pashto, Russian, Uzbek
Religion
Predominantly Sunni Islam[14]
minority Shia Islam[15]
Related ethnic groups
Other Iranian peoples

Tajiks (Persian: تاجيک، تاجک, romanized: Tājīk, Tājek; Tajik: Тоҷик, romanized: Tojik) are a Persian-speaking[16] Iranian ethnic group native to Central Asia, living primarily in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, and the second-largest in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. More Tajiks live in Afghanistan than Tajikistan. They speak varieties of Persian, a Western Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks.[17] In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages.[18][19] In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are counted as a separate ethnic group.[20]

As a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik, which originally had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians,[21][22] has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia.[16] Alternative names for the Tajiks are Fārsīwān (Persian-speaker), and Dīhgān (cf. Tajik: Деҳқон) which translates to "farmer or settled villager", in a wider sense "settled" in contrast to "nomadic" and was later used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as "Persian of noble blood" in contrast to Arabs, Turks and Romans during the Sassanid and early Islamic period.[23][21]

The Tajiks have a mixed origin, and are primarily descended from Bactrians, Sogdians, Scythians, but also Persians, Greeks and various Turkic peoples of Central Asia,[24][25][26] all of whom are known to have inhabited the region at various times. Tajiks are therefore mainly Eastern Iranian in their ethnic makeup but speak a Persian dialect, which is a Western Iranian language, likely adopting the language in the 7th century AD following the Islamic conquest of Persia, when the prestigious Persian language consequently spread further east leading to the gradual extinction of the Bactrian and Sogdian languages.[27][28] The Tajiks and their ancestors have inhabited Northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and other parts of Central Asia continuously for many millennia.[29] The culture of the Tajiks is predominantly Persianate but with strong elements from other cultures of Central Asia, such as Turkic and heavily infused with Islamic traditions.

  1. ^ "Afghanistan Population 2024 (Live)".
  2. ^ Mobasher, Mohammad Bashir. "Political Laws and Ethnic Accommodation: Why Cross-Ethnic Coalitions Have Failed to Institutionalize in Afghanistan" (PDF). digital.lib.washington.edu. University of Washington.
  3. ^ "Dissemination of the Republic of Tajikistan Population and Housing Census data 2020" (PDF). unece.org.
  4. ^ "Tajikistan Population 2024 (Live)".
  5. ^ "Permanent population by national and / Or ethnic group, urban / Rural place of residence".
  6. ^ Karl Cordell, "Ethnicity and Democratisation in the New Europe", Routledge, 1998. p. 201: "Consequently, the number of citizens who regard themselves as Tajiks is difficult to determine. Tajikis within and outside of the republic, Samarkand State University (SamGU) academic and international commentators suggest that there may be between six and seven million Tajiks in Uzbekistan, constituting 30% of the republic's 22 million population, rather than the official figure of 4.7%(Foltz 1996;213; Carlisle 1995:88).
  7. ^ Lena Jonson (1976) "Tajikistan in the New Central Asia", I.B.Tauris, p. 108: "According to official Uzbek statistics there are slightly over 1 million Tajiks in Uzbekistan or about 3% of the population. The unofficial figure is over 6 million Tajiks. They are concentrated in the Sukhandarya, Samarqand and Bukhara regions."
  8. ^ "Оценка численности постоянного населения по субъектам Российской Федерации". Federal State Statistics Service. Retrieved 31 August 2024.
  9. ^ "Total population by nationality (assessment at the beginning of the year, people)". Bureau of Statistics of Kyrgyzstan. 2021. Archived from the original on 28 October 2016. Retrieved 28 February 2022.
  10. ^ United States Census Bureau. "US demographic census". Archived from the original on 12 February 2020. Retrieved 23 January 2008. Of this number, approximately 65% are Tajiks according to a group of American researchers (Barbara Robson, Juliene Lipson, Farid Younos, Mariam Mehdi). Robson, Barbara and Lipson, Juliene (2002) "Chapter 5(B)- The People: The Tajiks and Other Dari-Speaking Groups" Archived 27 January 2010 at the Wayback Machine The Afghans – their history and culture Cultural Orientation Resource Center, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, D.C., OCLC 56081073 Archived 13 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine.
  11. ^ "Численность населения Республики Казахстан по отдельным этносам". stat.gov.kz. Archived from the original on 27 May 2020. Retrieved 23 August 2021.
  12. ^ "塔吉克族". www.gov.cn. Archived from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 6 December 2016.
  13. ^ State statistics committee of Ukraine – National composition of population, 2001 census Archived 23 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine (Ukrainian)
  14. ^ "Все новости". Archived from the original on 25 August 2010. Retrieved 14 February 2015.
  15. ^ "Tajikistan". U.S. Department of State. Archived from the original on 13 May 2021. Retrieved 14 February 2015.
  16. ^ a b C.E. Bosworth; B.G. Fragner (1999). "TĀDJĪK". Encyclopaedia of Islam (CD-ROM Edition v. 1.0 ed.). Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV.
  17. ^ Cite error: The named reference suny was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  18. ^ Arlund, Pamela S. (2006). An Acoustic, Historical, And Developmental Analysis of Sarikol Tajik Diphthongs. PhD Dissertation. The University of Texas at Arlington. p. 191. Archived from the original on 10 December 2013. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
  19. ^ Felmy, Sabine (1996). The voice of the nightingale: a personal account of the Wakhi culture in Hunza. Karachi: Oxford University Press. p. 4. ISBN 0-19-577599-6. Archived from the original on 10 April 2023. Retrieved 13 October 2015.
  20. ^ Minahan, James B. (10 February 2014). Ethnic Groups of North, East, and Central Asia: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO.
  21. ^ a b Foundation, Encyclopaedia Iranica. "Welcome to Encyclopaedia Iranica". iranicaonline.org. Archived from the original on 10 April 2010. Retrieved 17 August 2021.
  22. ^ B. A. Litvinsky, Ahmad Hasan Dani (1998). History of Civilizations of Central Asia: Age of Achievement, A.D. 750 to the end of the 15th-century. Excerpt: "...they were the basis for the emergence and gradual consolidation of what became an Eastern Persian-Tajik ethnic identity." pp. 101. UNESCO. ISBN 9789231032110.
  23. ^ M. Longworth Dames; G. Morgenstierne & R. Ghirshman (1999). "AFGHĀNISTĀN". Encyclopaedia of Islam (CD-ROM Edition v. 1.0 ed.). Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV.
  24. ^ Watson, Burton(1993). Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian. Translated by Burton Watson. Han Dynasty II (Revised Edition), pp. 244–245. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-08166-9; ISBN 0-231-08167-7 (pbk)
  25. ^ Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan : country studies Archived 20 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, page 206
  26. ^ Foltz, Richard (2019). A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East. I.B.Tauris. pp. 36–39. ISBN 978-1-7883-1652-1.
  27. ^ Paul Bergne (15 June 2007). The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic. I.B.Tauris. pp. 5–. ISBN 978-1-84511-283-7.
  28. ^ Josef W. Meri; Jere L. Bacharach (2006). Medieval Islamic Civilization: L-Z, index. Taylor & Francis. pp. 829–. ISBN 978-0-415-96692-4. Archived from the original on 6 October 2022. Retrieved 8 August 2024.
  29. ^ [1] Archived 21 October 2020 at the Wayback Machine Britannica Online Encyclopedia


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