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Tajik, Tajik Persian, Tajiki Persian, also called Tajiki, is the variety of Persian language spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by ethnic 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.Lazard, G. 1989Halimov 1974: 30–31Oafforov 1979: 33 The popularity of this conception of Tajik as a variety of Persian was such that, during the period in which Tajiks 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. (2025). 9783110622799, De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN 9783110622799 The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languagesStudies 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). has political aspects to it.
By way of Early New Persian, Tajik, like Iranian Persian and Dari, 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).Lazard, Gilbert (1975), The Rise of the New Persian Language.in Frye, R. N., The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 4, pp. 595–632, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Frye, R. N., "Darī", The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Brill Publications, CD versionRichard Foltz, A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East, London: Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2023, pp. 2–5.
Tajiki is one of the two official languages of Tajikistan, the other being Russian language 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. 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 language and neighbouring Turkic languages. The standard language is based on the northwestern dialects of Tajik (region of the old major city of Samarkand), 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.
In 1989, with the growth in Tajik nationalism, a law was enacted declaring Tajik the state (national) language, with Russian being the official language (as throughout the Soviet Union).In 1990 the Russian language was declared as the official language of USSR and the constituent republics had rights to declare additional state languages within their jurisdictions. See Article 4 of the Law on Languages of Nations of USSR. In addition, the law officially equated Tajik with Persian language, placing the word Farsi (the endonym for the Persian language) after Tajik. The law also called for a gradual reintroduction of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. ed. Ehteshami 2002, p. 219. ed. Malik 1996, p. 274. Banuazizi & Weiner 1994, p. 33.
In 1999, the word Farsi was removed from the state language law.
Tajiks are also found in large numbers in the Surxondaryo Region in the south and along Uzbekistan's eastern border with Tajikistan. Tajiki is still spoken by the majority of the population in Samarkand and Bukhara today although, as Richard Foltz has noted, their spoken dialects diverge considerably from the standard literary language and most cannot read it. (2025). 9780755649648, Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9780755649648
Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community comprises 5% of the nation's total population.Uzbekistan. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency (December 13, 2007). Retrieved on 2007-12-26. However, these numbers do not include ethnic Tajiks who, for a variety of reasons, choose to identify themselves as Uzbeks in population census forms.See for example the Country report on Uzbekistan, released by the United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor here.
During the Soviet "Uzbekisation" supervised by Sharof Rashidov, the head of the Uzbek Communist Party, Tajiks had to choose either to stay in Uzbekistan and get registered as Uzbek in their passports or leave the republic for the less-developed agricultural and mountainous Tajikistan.Rahim Masov, The History of the Clumsy Delimitation, Irfon Publ. House, Dushanbe, 1991 . English translation: The History of a National Catastrophe, transl. Iraj Bashiri, 1996. The "Uzbekisation" movement ended in 1924.Rahim Masov. (1996) The History of a National Catastrophe Bashiri Working Papers on Central Asia and Iran
In Tajikistan Tajiks constitute 80% of the population and the language dominates in most parts of the country. Some Tajiks in Gorno-Badakhshan in southeastern Tajikistan, where the Pamir languages are the native languages of most residents, are bilingual. Tajiks are the dominant ethnic group in Northern Afghanistan as well and are also the majority group in scattered pockets elsewhere in the country, particularly urban areas such as Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Ghazni, and Herat. Tajiks constitute between 25% and 35% of the total population of the country. In Afghanistan, the dialects spoken by ethnic Tajiks are written using the Persian alphabet and referred to as Dari, along with the dialects of other groups in Afghanistan such as the Hazaragi dialect and . Approximately 48%-58% of Afghan citizens are native speakers of Dari. A large Tajik-speaking diaspora exists due to the instability that has plagued Central Asia in recent years, with significant numbers of Tajiks found in Russia, Kazakhstan, and beyond. This Tajik diaspora is also the result of the poor state of the economy of Tajikistan and each year approximately one million men leave Tajikistan to gain employment in Russia.
A very important moment in the development of the contemporary Tajik, especially of the spoken language, is the tendency in changing its dialectal orientation. The dialects of Northern Tajikistan were the foundation of the prevalent standard Tajik, while the Southern dialects did not enjoy either popularity or prestige. Now all politicians and public officials make their speeches in the Kulob dialect, which is also used in broadcasting.E.K. Sobirov (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences). On learning the vocabulary of the Tajik language in modern times, p. 115.
| + Tajik vowelsKhojayori, Nasrullo, and Mikael Thompson. Tajiki Reference Grammar for Beginners. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2009. ! ! Front vowel ! Central vowel ! Back vowel |
In northern and Uzbek dialects, classical has forward in the mouth to . In central and southern dialects, classical has chain shifted upward and merged into . A Beginners' Guide to Tajiki by Azim Baizoyev and John Hayward, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p. 3 In the Zarafshon dialect, earlier has shifted to or , however from earlier remained (possibly due to influence from Yaghnobi).
The open back vowel has varyingly been described as mid-back ,Lazard, G. 1956Perry, J. R. (2005) ,Nakanishi, Akira, Writing Systems of the World and .Korotkow, M. (2004) It is analogous to standard Persian â (long a). However, it is standardly not a back vowel. Standard Tajik phonology by Shinji Ido, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2023
The vowel ⟨Ӣ ӣ⟩ usually represents a stressed /i/ at the end of a word. However, not all instances of ⟨Ӣ ӣ⟩ are stressed, as can be seen with the second person singular suffix -ӣ remaining unstressed.
The vowels /i/, /u/ and /a/ may be reduced to ə in unstressed syllables.
At least in the dialect of Bukhara, ⟨Ч ч⟩ and ⟨Ҷ ҷ⟩ are pronounced and respectively, with ⟨Ш ш⟩ and ⟨Ж ж⟩ also being and .Ido, Shinji. 2014. Illustrations of the IPA: Bukharan Tajik. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 44. 87–102. Cambridge University Press.
In Iranian Persian, the present progressive form consists of the verb دار, dār, 'to have' followed by a conjugated verb in either the simple present tense, the habitual past tense or the habitual past perfect tense.Windfuhr, Gernot. Persian Grammar: History and State of Its Study. De Gruyter, 1979. Trends in Linguistics. State-Of-The-Art Reports.
Two forms of number exist in Tajik, singular and plural. The plural is marked by either the suffix -ҳо or -он (with contextual variants -ён and -гон ), although Arabic loan words may use Arabic forms. There is no definite article, but the indefinite article exists in the form of the number "one" як and -е , the first positioned before the noun and the second joining the noun as a suffix. When a noun is used as a direct object, it is marked by the suffix -ро , e.g., Рустамро задам . This direct object suffix is added to the word after any plural suffixes. The form -ро can be literary or formal. In older forms of the Persian language, -ро could indicate both direct and indirect objects and some phrases used in modern Persian language and Tajik have maintained this suffix on indirect objects, as seen in the following example: Худоро шукр ). Modern Persian language does not use the direct object marker as a suffix on the noun, but rather, as a stand-alone morpheme.
| +Simple prepositions |
| from, through, across |
| to |
| on, upon, onto |
| without |
| with |
| at, in |
| up to, as far as, until |
| like, as |
In the table below, Persian language refers to the standard language of Iran, which differs somewhat from the Dari of Afghanistan. Two other Iranian languages, Pashto and Kurmanji, have also been included for comparative purposes.
Following the Arabs conquest of Iran and most of Central Asia in the 8th century AD, Arabic for a time became the court language and Persian language and other Iranian languages were relegated to the private sphere. In the 9th century AD, following the rise of the , whose state was centered around the cities of Bukhoro (Buxoro), Samarqand and Herat and covered much of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and northeastern Iran, New Persian emerged as the court language and swiftly displaced Arabic.
New Persian became the lingua franca of Central Asia for centuries, although it eventually lost ground to the Chaghatai language in much of its former domains as a growing number of Turkic peoples tribes moved into the region from the east. Since the 16th century AD, Tajik has come under increasing pressure from neighbouring Turkic languages. Once spoken in areas of Turkmenistan, such as Merv, Tajik is today virtually non-existent in that country. Uzbek language has also largely replaced Tajik in most areas of modern Uzbekistan – the Russian Empire in particular implemented Turkification among Tajiks in Ferghana and Samarqand, replacing the dominant language in those areas with Uzbek. Nevertheless, Tajik persisted in pockets, notably in Samarqand, Bukhoro and Surxondaryo Region, as well as in much of what is today Tajikistan.
The creation of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic within the Soviet Union in 1929 helped to safeguard the future of Tajik, as it became an official language of the republic alongside Russian language. Still, substantial numbers of Tajik speakers remained outside the borders of the republic, mostly in the neighbouring Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, which created a source of tension between Tajiks and Uzbeks. Neither Samarqand nor Bukhoro was included in the nascent Tajik SSR, despite their immense historical importance in Tajik history. After the creation of the Tajik SSR, a large number of ethnic Tajiks from the Uzbek SSR migrated there, particularly to the region of the capital, Dushanbe, exercising a substantial influence in the republic's political, cultural and economic life. The influence of this influx of ethnic Tajik immigrants from the Uzbek SSR is most prominently manifested in the fact that literary Tajik is based on their northwestern dialects of the language, rather than the central dialects that are spoken by the natives in the Dushanbe region and adjacent areas.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and Tajikistan's independence in 1991, the government of Tajikistan has made substantial efforts to promote the use of Tajik in all spheres of public and private life. Tajik is gaining ground among the once-Russification upper classes and continues its role as the vernacular of the majority of the country's population. There has been a rise in the number of Tajik publications. Increasing contact with media from Iran and Afghanistan, after decades of isolation under the Soviets, as well as governmental orientation toward a "Persianisation" of the language have brought closer Tajik and the other Persian dialects.
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