Tajik

Tajik (Tajiki Persian, Galcha) is a member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Tajik is the local name used for Persian in Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, where it is spoken by 3.3 million people.

Tajiks are the principal ethnic group in most of Tajikistan, in northeastern Afghanistan and in the cities of Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, and Herat. Tajiks also dominate the population of the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan. The worldwide population of Tajik speakers is estimated at around 4.4 million people (Ethnologue). There are several unproven theories about origin of the name Tajik.

Although Tajik is a variety of Eastern Persian, it has diverged from Persian as spoken in Afghanistan and Iran, because of its geopolitical isolation and the influence of Russian and neighbouring Turkic languages such as Uzbek and Kyrghyz.

Prior to the conquest of Central Asia by the Arabs in the 6th-8th centuries AD, the population of the area that is now Tajikistan spoke Sogdian. In the first millennium AD, Sogdian was widely used in Central Asia for oral and written communication but was eventually replaced by Persian, the lingua franca of the Persian Empire. A variety of Sogdian survives today in the Yaghnobi language, still spoken in Tajikistan by a few thousand people. Some linguists believe that the peculiarities of Tajik, as compared to Persian, can be explained partly by its Sogdian substrate.

The Tajik people came under Russian rule in the second half of the 19th century, but Tsarist Russia's hold on Central Asia was weak until the Soviet regime finally established firm control over the area by 1925. After the founding of the Soviet Republic of Tajikistan, Tajik became the national language of the new republic. During the 1920s-1930s, Russian and Tajik linguists standardised the language and the writing system. Literacy rates in Tajik improved dramatically. Tajik was taught in schools and at the university, books, periodicals and newspapers were published in Tajik, and radio and television broadcast in Tajik. However, Tajik played a secondary role to Russian which dominated all official communication.

Tajik became the national language of the newly independent Tajikistan in 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, Tajikistan suffered from a devastating civil war which lasted from 1992 to 1997. In an attempt to establish a greater national identity, a law was passed mandating the use of Tajik, instead of Russian, in all official communication. However, implementation has encountered difficulties due to a variety of reasons: (1) only a third of the population of Tajikistan know the language; (2) Tajik lacks the necessary technical, scientific, and socio-political terminology for the 21st-century. Today, Tajik is used as a medium of instruction, along with Russian, at all levels of education in Tajikistan. Newspapers, books, and periodicals are published in Tajik, and radio and television are broadcast in Tajik in both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

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