Tajik language

Tajik or Tajik Persian, (sometimes written Tadjiki or Tadzhiki; тоҷикӣ, تاجیکی‎, tocikī [tɔːdʒɪˈkiː]) a Southwestern Iranian language that is genetically closely related to such major languages as Persian and Dari. It is considered a variety of the Persian language. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Tajik was considered by a number of writers and researchers to be a variety of Persian (Halimov 1974: 30–31, Oafforov 1979: 33). The popularity of this conception of Tajik as a (less prestigious) variety of Persian was such that, during the period in which Tajik intellectuals were trying to establish Tajik as a language separate from Persian, Sadriddin Ayni, who was a prominent intellectual and educator, had to make a statement that Tajik was not a bastardized dialect of Persian. The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political sides to it (see Perry 1996).[5] Today Tajik is recognized as an autonomous West-Iranian language, independent from Persian and Dari, through genetically linked to them.

Tajik is the official language of Afghanistan and Tajikistan. In Afghanistan, where Tajiks make up a large part of the population, their speech is less influenced by Turkic languages and is called Dari. Tajik has diverged from Persian as spoken in Afghanistan and Iran due to political borders, geographical isolation, the standardization process, and the influence of Russian and neighboring Turkic languages. The standard language is based on the northwestern dialects of Tajik (region of old major city of Samarqand), which have been somewhat influenced by the neighboring 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.