Tajik Language Services

Tajik, Tajik Persian, or Tajiki, is a variety of modern Persian spoken in Central Asia. Most speakers of Tajik live in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Tajik is the official language of Tajikistan. In Afghanistan, where Tajiks make up a large part of the population, the dialect is less influenced by Turkic languages and is called Dari. The dialect has diverged from Persian as spoken in Afghanistan and Iran, as a result of political borders, geographical isolation, the standardization process, and the influence of Russian and neighbouring Turkic languages. The standard language is based on the north-western dialects of Tajik (region of 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. Geographical distribution The most important historically Tajik/Persian-speaking cities of Central Asia, Samarqand and Bukhara, are in present-day Uzbekistan. In Uzbekistan Tajiks are the largest part of the population of the ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarqand, and are found in large numbers in the Surxondaryo Province in the south and along Uzbekistan’s eastern border with Tajikistan. Tajik is still widely spoken in Samarqand and Bukhara today as Tajiks account for perhaps 70% of the total population of Samarqand and have been estimated to make up as much as 90% of Bukhara. 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 “Uzbekization”, and was 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 “Uzbekization” movement ended in 1924. Native Tajiks living in the nation of Uzbekistan have reportedly estimated that Tajiks make up 25-30% of the nation’s population. Tajiks constitute 80% of Tajikistan’s population, and Persian dominates in most parts of the country. Some Tajiks in Badakhshan in southeastern Tajikistan, where the Pamiri languages are the native languages of most residents, are bilingual-speakers. 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, Kunduz, Ghazni and Herat. Tajiks constitute between 25% and 30% of the total population of the country. In Afghanistan, the dialects spoken by ethnic Tajiks are written using the Perso-Arabic script and referred to as Dari, along with the Persian dialects of other groups in Afghanistan such as the Hazara and Aimaq. 50% 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 as each year approximately one million men leave Tajikistan in order to gain employment in Russia.