Tajik language
Tajik, Tajik Persian, Tajiki Persian, also called Tajiki, is the variety of Persian 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. The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political aspects to it.
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, itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire.
Tajiki is one of the two official languages of Tajikistan, the other being Russian 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 and neighbouring Turkic languages. The standard language is based on the northwestern dialects of Tajik, 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.
Name
Up to and including the nineteenth century, speakers in Afghanistan and Central Asia had no separate name for the language and simply regarded themselves as speaking Farsi, which is the endonym for the Persian language. The term Tajik derives from Persian, although it has been adopted by the speakers themselves. For most of the 20th century, its name was rendered in the Russian spelling of Tadzhik.In 1989, with the growth in Tajik nationalism, a law was enacted declaring Tajik the state language, with Russian being the official language. In addition, the law officially equated Tajik with Persian, placing the word Farsi after Tajik. The law also called for a gradual reintroduction of the Perso-Arabic alphabet.
In 1999, the word Farsi was removed from the state language law.
Geographical distribution
Two major cities of Central Asia, Samarkand and Bukhara, are in present-day Uzbekistan, but are defined by a prominent native usage of Tajik language. Today, virtually all Tajik speakers in Bukhara are bilingual in Tajik and Uzbek. This Tajik–Uzbek bilingualism has had a strong influence on the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Bukharan Tajik.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.
Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community comprises 5% of the nation's total population. However, these numbers do not include ethnic Tajiks who, for a variety of reasons, choose to identify themselves as Uzbeks in population census forms.
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. The "Uzbekisation" movement ended in 1924.
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 and Aimaq dialects. 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.
Dialects
Tajik dialects can be approximately split into the following groups:- Northern dialects.
- Central dialects
- Southern dialects
- Southeastern dialects
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.
Phonology
Vowels
The table below lists the six vowel phonemes in standard, literary Tajik. Letters from the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet are given first, followed by IPA transcription. Local dialects frequently have more than the six seen below.In northern and Uzbek dialects, classical has shifted forward in the mouth to. In central and southern dialects, classical has shifted upward and merged into. In the Zarafshon dialect, earlier has shifted to or, however from earlier remained.
The open back vowel has varyingly been described as mid-back,, and. It is analogous to standard Persian â. However, it is standardly not a back vowel.
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 in unstressed syllables.
Consonants
The Tajik language contains 24 consonants, 16 of which form contrastive pairs by voicing: . The table below lists the consonant phonemes in standard, literary Tajik. Letters from the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet are given first, followed by IPA transcription.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.
Word stress
generally falls on the first syllable in finite verb forms and on the last syllable in nouns and noun-like words. Examples of where stress does not fall on the last syllable are adverbs like: бале and зеро. Stress also does not fall on enclitics, nor on the marker of the direct object.Grammar
The word order of Tajiki Persian is subject–object–verb. Tajik Persian grammar is similar to the classical Persian grammar. The most notable difference between classical Persian grammar and Tajik Persian grammar is the construction of the present progressive tense in each language. In Tajik, the present progressive form consists of a present progressive participle, from the verb истодан, istodan, 'to stand' and a cliticised form of the verb -acт, -ast, 'to be'.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.
Nouns
Nouns are not marked for grammatical gender, although they are marked for number.Two forms of grammatical number exist in Tajik, singular and plural. The plural is marked by either the suffix -ҳо or -он . Modern Persian does not use the direct object marker as a suffix on the noun, but rather, as a stand-alone morpheme.
Prepositions
Vocabulary
Tajik is conservative in its vocabulary, retaining numerous terms that have long since fallen into disuse in Iran and Afghanistan, such as арзиз and фарбеҳ . Most modern loan words in Tajik come from Russian as a result of the position of Tajikistan within the Soviet Union. The vast majority of these Russian loanwords which have entered the Tajik language through the fields of socioeconomics, technology and government, where most of the concepts and vocabulary of these fields have been borrowed from the Russian language. The introduction of Russian loanwords into the Tajik language was largely justified under the Soviet policy of modernisation and the necessary subordination of all languages to Russian for the achievement of a Communist state. Vocabulary also comes from the geographically close Uzbek language and, as is usual in Islamic countries, from Arabic. Since the late 1980s, an effort has been made to replace loanwords with native equivalents, using either old terms that had fallen out of use or coined terminology. Many of the coined terms for modern items such as гармкунак and чангкашак differ from their Afghan and Iranian equivalents, adding to the difficulty in intelligibility between Tajik and other forms of Persian.In the table below, Persian refers to the standard language of Iran, which differs somewhat from the Dari Persian of Afghanistan. Two other Iranian languages, Pashto and Kurdish, have also been included for comparative purposes.