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Tajiks (Dari: تاجیکان, Tajik language: Тоҷикон), also spelled Tadzhiks or Tadjiks, are a group of various Persian language-speaking Iranian peoples groups of people native to Central Asia, living mainly in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Even though the term Tajik does not refer to a cohesive cross-national ethnic group,Nourzhanov, K., & Bleuer, C. (2013). Forging Tajik Identity: Ethnic Origins, National–Territorial Delimitation and Nationalism. In Tajikistan: A Political and Social History (pp. 27–50). ANU Press. Link: [1] Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, and the second-largest in both Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. They speak variations of Persian language, a west Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiris and Yaghnobi people ethnic groups are included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are considered a separate ethnic group.
As a self-designation, the literary Persian language term Tajik, which originally had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranian peoples,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. . has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet Union administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Farsiwan (Persian-speaker), and Dehqan (cf. ) 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 "Persians of noble blood" in contrast to Arabs, Turkic peoples and Ancient Rome during the Sassanid and early period.
The Tajiks are of mixed origin, and are primarily descendants of , , Scythians, but also Persians, Dayuan, and various Turkic peoples of Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan : country studies Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, page 206 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. This was when the Persian language consequently spread further east leading to the gradual extinction of the Bactrian and Sogdian language languages. The Tajiks and their ancestors have inhabited Northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and other parts of Central Asia continuously for many millennia.[3] Britannica Online Encyclopedia 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.
Contemporary Tajiks are the descendants of ancient Eastern Iranian inhabitants of Central Asia, in particular, the and the . They are also possible descendants of other groups, with an admixture of Western Iranian Persians and non-Iranian peoples. The latter group includes Greeks who are known to have settled in the Tajikistan and Uzbekistan region before and after the conquests of Alexander the Great, and some of them were referred to as Dayuan by ancient Chinese chronicles.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. ; (pbk) According to Richard Nelson Frye, a leading historian of Iranian and Central Asian history, the Persian migration to Central Asia may be considered the beginning of the modern Tajik nation, and ethnic Persians, along with some elements of East-Iranian Bactrians and Sogdians, as the main ancestors of modern Tajiks.Richard Nelson Frye, "Persien: bis zum Einbruch des Islam" (original English title: "The Heritage of Persia"), German version, tr. by Paul Baudisch, Kindler Verlag AG, Zürich 1964, pp. 485–498 In later works, Frye expands on the complexity of the historical origins of the Tajiks. In a 1996 publication, Frye explains that many "factors must be taken into account in explaining the evolution of the peoples whose remnants are the Tajiks in Central Asia" and that "the peoples of Central Asia, whether Iranian or Turkic languages speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them."
Regarding Tajiks, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:
The geographical division between the eastern and western Iranians is often considered historically and currently to be the desert Dasht-e Kavir, situated in the center of the Iranian plateau. "Western languages were located in the western portion of the Iranian plateau, separated by the Dasht - e Kavir and Dasht - e Lūt deserts from the Eastern Iranian dialects."
The most plausible and generally accepted origin of the word is Middle Persian tāzīk 'Arab' (cf. New Persian tāzi), or an Iranian (Sogdian or Parthian) cognate word. The Muslim armies that invaded Transoxiana early in the eighth century, conquering the Sogdian principalities and clashing with the Qarluq Turks (see Bregel, Atlas, Maps 8–10) consisted not only of Arabs, but also of Persian converts from Fārs and the central Zagros region (Bartol'd Barthold, "Tadžiki," pp. 455–57). Hence the Turks of Central Asia adopted a variant of the Iranian word, täžik, to designate their Muslim adversaries in general. For example, the rulers of the south Indian Chalukya dynasty and Rashtrakuta dynasty also referred to the Arabs as "Tajika" in the 8th and 9th century.Political History of the Chālukyas of Badami by Durga Prasad Dikshit p.192The First Spring: The Golden Age of India by Abraham Eraly p.91 By the eleventh century (Yusof Ḵāṣṣ-ḥājeb, Kutadgu Bilig, lines 280, 282, 3265), the Qarakhanid Turks applied this term more specifically to the Persian Muslims in the Oxus basin and Khorasan, who were variously the Turks' rivals, models, overlords (under the Samanid Dynasty), and subjects (from Ghaznavid times on). Persian writers of the Ghaznavid, Seljuq Empire and Atabeg periods (ca. 1000–1260) adopted the term and extended its use to cover Persians in the rest of Greater Iran, now under Turkish rule, as early as the poet ʿOnṣori, ca. 1025 (Dabirsiāqi, pp. 3377, 3408). Iranians soon accepted it as an ethnonym, as is shown by a Persian court official's referring to mā tāzikān "we Tajiks" (Bayhaqi, ed. Fayyāz, p. 594). The distinction between Turk and Tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of the (ideally) nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy (Niẓām al-Molk: tāzik, pp. 146, 178–79; Fragner, "Tādjīk. 2" in EI2 10, p. 63).The word also occurs in the 8th-century Tonyukuk inscriptions as tözik, used for a local Arab tribe in the Tashkent area. These Arabs were said to be from the Taz tribe, which is still found in Yemen. In the 7th-century, the Taz began to Islamize the region of Transoxiana in Central Asia.
According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, however, the oldest known usage of the word Tajik as a reference to Persians in Persian literature can be found in the writings of the famous Persian poet and Islamic scholar Rumi.C.E. Bosworth/B.G. Fragner, "Tādjīk", in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Online Edition: "... In Islamic usage, Tādjīk eventually came to designate the Persians, as opposed to Turks ... the oldest citation for it which Schraeder could find was in verses of Djalāl al-Dīn Rūmī ..." The 15th-century Turkic-speaking poet Mīr Alī Šer Navā'ī who lived in the Timurid Empire also used Tajik as a reference to Persians.Ali Shir Nava'i Muhakamat al-lughatain tr. & ed. Robert Devereaux (Leiden: Brill) 1966 p6
Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community accounts for 5% of the nation's population. During the Soviet "Uzbekization" supervised by Sharof Rashidov, the head of the Uzbek Communist Party, Tajiks had to choose either stay in Uzbekistan and get registered as Uzbek in their passports or leave the republic for Tajikistan, which is mountainous and less agricultural.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. It is only in the last population census (1989) that the nationality could be reported not according to the passport, but freely declared based on the respondent's ethnic self-identification. Ethnic Atlas of Uzbekistan , Part 1: Ethnic minorities, Open Society Institute, p. 195 . This had the effect of increasing the Tajik population in Uzbekistan from 3.9% in 1979 to 4.7% in 1989.
According to other sources, Tajiks live exclusively in the centers of cities such as Samarkand, Bukhara, and Termez. There are practically no Tajiks in the countryside outside of the City. If you count the population figures for these cities, it barely reaches one million. It is therefore unreasonable to claim that over six million Tajiks live in Uzbekistan, as Richard Foltz has claimed.
Even Arne Haugen, a Central Asia expert, criticized and noted in 2018: While Richard Foltz estimates over 6 million Tajiks in Uzbekistan, official census data reports only ~1.5 million (Stat.uz, 2023). This discrepancy likely stems from counting Tajik-speaking Uzbeks as ethnic Tajiks. Geographically, Tajiks are concentrated in urban Samarkand/Bukhara, with negligible rural presenceHaugen, A. The establishment of national republics in Soviet Central Asia. Palgrave. –
According to the U.S. State Department Report, it is estimated that there are between 1.2 and 1.8 million Tajiks in Uzbekistan.
Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community accounts for 4.5% of the nation's population. Approximately 1.7 million Tajiks live in Uzbekistan. It is difficult to accurately count the number of Tajiks in Uzbekistan, as many Uzbeks, Turkmens, Azerbaijanis, and Jews also speak Persian. – although the second largest city of Uzbekistan, it is predominantly a Tajik populated city, along with Bukhara.|250x250px]]
West Eurasian maternal lineages included haplogroups H, J, K, T, I, W and U. East Eurasian lineages included haplogroups M, C, Z, D, G, A, Y and B. South Asian lineages detected in this study included haplogroups M and R. One lineage in the Tajik sample was assigned to the North African maternal haplogroup X2j.
The dominant Y-DNA haplogroup among modern Tajiks is the Haplogroup R1a Y-DNA. ~45% of Tajik men share R1a (M17), ~18% J (M172), ~8% R2 (M124), and ~8% C (M130 & M48). Tajiks of Panjikent score 68% R1a, Tajiks of Khojant score 64% R1a. According to another genetic test, 63% of Tajik male samples from Tajikistan carry R1a. This high frequency combined with low diversity of Tajik R1a reflects a strong founder effect. An autosomal DNA study by Guarino-Vignon et al. (2022), suggested that modern Tajiks show genetic continuity with ancient samples from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. The genetic ancestry of Tajiks consists largely of a West-Eurasian component (~74%), an East Asian-related component (~18%), and a South Asian component (~8%). According to the authors, the South Asian affinity of Tajiks was previously unreported, although evidence for the presence of a deep South Asian ancestry was already found previously in other Central Asian samples (e.g. among modern Turkmens and historical Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex samples). Both historical and more recent geneflow (~1500 years ago) shaped the genetic makeup of Southern Central Asian populations, such as the Tajiks. A follow-up study by Dai et al. (2022) estimated that the Tajiks derive between 11.6 and 18.6% ancestry from admixture with from an East-Eurasian steppe source represented by the Xiongnu, with the remainder of their ancestry being derived from Western Steppe Herders and BMAC components, as well as a small contribution from the early population associated with the Tarim mummies. The authors concluded that Tajiks "present patterns of genetic continuity of Central Asians since the Bronze Age". "The Historical Era gene flow derived from the Eastern Steppe with the representative of Mongolia_Xiongnu_o1 made a more substantial contribution to Kyrgyz and other Turkic-speaking populations (i.e., Kazakh, Uyghur, Turkmen, and Uzbek; 34.9–55.2%) higher than that to the Tajik populations (11.6–18.6%; fig. 4A), suggesting Tajiks suffer fewer impacts of the recent admixtures (Martínez-Cruz et al. 2011). Consequently, the Tajik populations generally present patterns of genetic continuity of Central Asians since the Bronze Age. Our results are consistent with linguistic and genetic evidence that the spreading of Indo-European speakers into Central Asia was earlier than the expansion of Turkic speakers (Kuz′mina and Mallory 2007; Yunusbayev et al. 2015)."
Once you said 'you are Iranian', then you said, 'you are Tajik'May he die separated from his roots, he who separated us.Moḥammad Reẓa Shafi‘ī-Kadkanī, ‘Borbad's Khusravanis – First Iranian Songs’, in Iraj Bashiri (tr and ed), From the Hymns of Zarathustra to the Songs of Borbad, Dushanbe, 2003, p. 135.
Since the 19th century, Tajiki has been strongly influenced by the Russian language and has incorporated many Russian language loan words.Michael Knüppel. Turkic Loanwords in Persian . Encyclopædia Iranica. It has also adopted fewer Arabic language loan words than Iranian Persian while retaining vocabulary that has fallen out of use in the latter language.
Many Tajiks can read, speak or write in Russian, while the prestige and importance of Russian has declined since the fall of the Soviet Union and the exodus of Russians from Central Asia. Nevertheless, Russian fluency is still considered a vital skill for business and education.
The dialects of modern Persian language spoken throughout Greater Iran have a common origin. This is due to the fact that one of Greater Iran's historical cultural capitals, called Greater Khorasan, which included parts of modern Central Asia and much of Afghanistan and constitutes as the Tajik's ancestral homeland, played a key role in the development and propagation of Persian language and culture throughout much of Greater Iran after the Muslim conquest. Furthermore, early manuscripts of the historical Persian spoken in Mashhad during the development of Middle to New Persian show that their origins came from Sistan, in present-day Afghanistan.
Today, the great majority of Tajiks follow Sunni Islam, although small Twelver and Ismaili Shia minorities also exist in scattered pockets. Areas with large numbers of Shias include Herat Province, Badakhshan provinces in Afghanistan, the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province in Tajikistan, and Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in China. Some of the famous Islamic scholars were from either modern or historical East-Iranian regions lying in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and therefore can arguably be viewed as Tajiks. They include Abu Hanifa, Imam Bukhari, Al-Tirmidhi, Abu Dawood, Nasir Khusraw and many others.
According to a 2009 U.S. State Department release, the population of Tajikistan is 98% Muslim, (approximately 85% Sunni Islam and 5% Shia). In Afghanistan, the great number of Tajiks adhere to Sunni Islam. A small number of Tajiks may follow Twelver Shia Islam; the Farsiwan are one such group.
Tajikistan marked 2009 as the year to commemorate the Tajik Sunni Muslim jurist Abu Hanifa, whose ancestry hailed from Parwan Province of Afghanistan, as the nation hosted an international symposium that drew scientific and religious leaders. The construction of one of the largest mosques in the world, funded by Qatar, was announced in October 2009. The mosque is planned to be built in Dushanbe and construction is said to be completed by 2014.
In September 2009, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan proposed a draft law to have the nation's language referred to as "Tajiki-Farsi" rather than "Tajik." The proposal drew criticism from Russian media since the bill sought to remove the Russian language as Tajikistan's inter-ethnic lingua franca. In 1989, the original name of the language (Farsi) had been added to its official name in brackets, though Rahmon's government renamed the language to simply "Tajiki" in 1994. On 6 October 2009, Tajikistan adopted the law that removes Russian as the lingua franca and mandated Tajik as the language to be used in official documents and education, with an exception for members Tajikistan's ethnic minority groups, who would be permitted to receive an education in the language of their choosing.
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