Tajik

Introduction

Central Asia Map 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 Tajikistan of its geopolitical isolation and the influence of Russian and neighboring 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 Tajik Men 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 standardized 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 man 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.

Dialects

Tajik Men

Russian sources identify more than 50 different varieties of Tajik. They are usually divided into four major dialect groups:

Northern dialects are spoken in Northern Tajikistan, southern parts of Uzbekistan including the cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, and Fergana, and in Kyrgyzstan. Standard Tajik is based on the varieties spoken in Samarkand and Bukhara.
Southern dialects
Southeastern dialects
Central dialects

The dialects are by-and-large mutually intelligible.

Structure

Sound System

Tajik Man

Tajik women

The sound system of Tajik has 29 phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning.

Vowels
Tajik has six vowel phonemes: /i/, /e/, /æ/, /u/, /o/, /a/. Some nouns always have the same length, while the length of others depends on the environment in which they occur.

Consonants
Tajik has 23 consonant phonemes.

.	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	p - b		t - d		k - g	q
Fricatives		f - v	s - z	-	x	.	h
Affricate				t - d
Nasal	m	..	n.	.		..	.
Lateral	...	..s	l	..		..	.
Trill	...	..	r	.		.	.
Glide				j

// - // = as in shape and measure;
/x/ - /q/ = no equivalents in English;
/t/ - /d/ = as in chat and jet ;
// = similar to the glottal catch in English uh-oh.

Stress
Stress typically falls on the last syllable of the root.

Click here to listen to radio Ozodi broadcasts in Tajik.

Grammar

Bukhara

Samarkand

Tajik is an inflected language, i.e., it adds prefixes and suffixes to roots to express grammatical categories and to form words. Unlike many other Iranian languages, Persian, Dari and Tajik have lost most of their noun and verb inflections. The following grammar sketch of Persian should cover the basic features of Tajik grammar.

Noun phrase

Nouns can be simple or compound.
Any unmodified noun may be generic, i.e., it can refer to one or more than one entities. Plural is not obligatory when more than one entity are implied: -hā signals plural with count nouns, e.g., ketāb-hā 'books,' and amplification with mass nouns, e.g., āb-hā 'all kinds of water, lots of water.' Human nouns take -ān, while nouns borrowed from Arabic usually take -in.
There is no grammatical gender.
Tajik distinguishes between genericity and indefiniteness which applies to both count and to mass nouns. It is expressed by -i, e.g., ketāb-i 'some/a book,' ketāb-hā-i 'some books,' āb-džow-i 'some beer,' āb-džow-hā-i "some kinds of beer.'
Definiteness is not formally marked.
Possession is markedby -e, e.g., ketāb -e-Ali 'the book of Ali.'
Topicalization is marked by -ra, e.g., be-man ketāb-rā Hasan 'as for the book, he gave it to Hasan.'

Verb phrase
Tajik verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. They are marked for the following categories:

There are three moods: indicative, subjunctive (potential actions), counterfactual (actions/states that are unlikely to or did not occur).
There are three tenses: present, past, and inferential past. Inferential past expresses second-hand knowledge, information, or conclusions.
There are two aspects: imperfective and perfective. Aspect is as important as tense.
Causality is marked by the suffix -ān, e.g., xor 'to eat' — xorān 'to feed.'
Future is not a tense but a modality (similar to the English want to/wanna + infinitive). All present and past forms may be used in a future context.
Subject pronouns are usually dropped since the verb form itself carries information about person and number.

Word order
The normal word order in Tajik is Subject-Object-Verb. Modifiers follow the nouns they modify.

Vocabulary

Tajik people

Tajik shares most of its basic vocabulary with Persian. However, due to the influence of Russian and neighboring Turkic languages, such as Uzbek and Kyrgyz, it has a large numer of Russian and Turkic loan words. For instance, the names of the months were borrowed from Russian.

Below are the Tajik numerals 1-10.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
yak	du	se	chor	panj	shash	haft	hasht	nuh	dah

Writing

Tajik People

Tajik woman

Tajik Man

Tajik Village

Tajik man and donkey

Over the course of its history, Tajik was written in three different scripts.

Perso-Arabic script
As a result of Islamic influence, Tajik was written in the Perso-Arabic script up to the 1920s.

Latin script
In an effort to increase literacy and to distance the largely illiterate population from the influence of Islam, Soviet linguists began to simplify the Perso-Arabic script in 1923, before moving to a Latin-based alphabet which was officially adopted in 1928. Only lowercase letters were found in the first versions of the Latin variant.

Tajik Alphabet Latin

Cyrillic script
As part of the russification of Central Asian republics, a modified Cyrillic script was introduced in the late 1930s. In 1989, with the growth in Tajik nationalism, a law was enacted declaring Tajik the state language, equating it with Persian, and calling for a gradual reintroduction of the Arabic alphabet. However, Cyrillic continues as the de-facto standard, and only a few Tajiks can read the Arabic alphabet. Most recently, the government of Tajikistan has made attempts to return to the Latin alphabet.

Tajik alphabet

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Tajik in three different scripts.

Perso-Arabic

Tajik Perso Arabic

Latin
Tamomi odamon ozod ba dunyo meojand va az lihozi manzilatu huquq bo ham barobarand. Hama sohibi aqlu viçdonand, bojad nisbat ba jakdigar barodarvor munosabat namojand.

Translation
Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Resources

Click here to find out where Persian (Farsi, Dari, Tajik) are taught in the United States.
Click here to find learning materials for studying Persian ((Farsi, Dari, Tajik).

Online resources for the study of Persian (Dari, Tajik) language and culture
Iranian Languages.com
University of Arizona Iranian languages links
Wikipedia article on Tajik Language
Ethnologue report on Persian
UCLA Language Profile for Tajik
BBCcountry profile: Tajikistan
Radio Ozodi

Interesting Facts

Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam (1048-1123 AD)
All Persian-speaking people in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan claim the same literary masters. Among them is Omar Khayyam who left a lasting legacy as a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet. Khayyam means 'tent maker.' He compiled astronomical tables, contributed to calendar reform, and discovered a geometrical method of solving cubic equation. In the English-speaking world, he is best known for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (rubaiyat means 'quatrains').