The official language of Tajikistan is Tajik. Linguists attribute it to the Iranian group of Indo-European languages. The total number of people speaking it is estimated by specialists at 8.5 million. Around the Tajik language for over a hundred years, disputes about its status have not abated: is it a language or an ethnic subspecies of Persian? Of course, the problem is political in nature.
Question about Tajik language affiliation
The creation of the Tajik language began during the reign of Soviet power. An active part in upholding his independence and analysis of differences from Persian and Dari was taken by public figure, writer and philologist Sadriddin Aini.
Today, there is a New Persian continuum in Central Asia, spreading from Iran to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It is customary to call a continuum all nations that are able to understand each other and speak the language of one family. It is established that Tajiks and Persian-speaking residents of Afghanistan and Iran still have not lost the opportunity to understand each other.
Political Question of Language
The emergence of one's own dialect in Tajikistan was the result of an active policy to create national identities that could counter foreign influence. For example, in one of the areas, the Circassian ethnic group was divided into several sub-ethnic groups, for each of which its own language and national republic was created. Often several different nations coexisted in one republic, which, according to the authorities, prevented centrifugal sentiments.
It is worth noting that in Central Asia the borders of the new national republics were drawn in a similar way. In order to create an identity for the residents of Tajikistan that is different from the Persian-speaking residents of Afghanistan and the Iranians, a separate language was created with its own written language and vocabulary features.
Despite the visible differences between the Iranian dialects from each other, Tajik translators can understand Dari speakers, and sometimes those who speak Farsi.
Language history
Actually, the term "Tajik language" came into use in the 20s of the twentieth century. Until then, in the vast expanses of Central Asia, the term Farsi, that is, Persian, was used exclusively to refer to the literary dialect understood by all residents of the former Bactria and Sogdiana.
The language that existed in Central Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century, elevated its genealogy to the Middle Persian Koin, which served as the lingua franca for urban residents of the Persian Empire and its neighboring states, starting with Vlll.
In the lX century, Islam began to spread actively throughout Asia, and the New Persian dialect, Dari, became the main language of Islamic preaching for several centuries. It displaces the Sogdian and Bactrian, relics of which have survived to this day only in remote mountain areas of the Pamirs. Thus, the modern language of Tajikistan is the heir to the great New Persian language, which brought to Central Asia a new religion and Islamic enlightenment.
Language distribution
Having found out what language is spoken in Tajikistan, we will turn to neighboring states, since speakers of Persian dialects also live in them. In addition to Tajikistan, Tajik is also distributed in several internal regions of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. But, despite the significant number of people speaking this language, it is not official in any other republic of Central Asia. True, in Bukhara and Samarkand there are large educational centers that teach and teach in Tajik.
In Tajikistan itself, the language is far from widespread throughout the country, since a significant part of the country speaks several Pamir dialects that are the heirs of the ancient Asian languages of Sogdiana and Bactria.
Diaspora and dialects
It is worth noting that Tajik is not uniform: it contains many dialects, a detailed description of which was compiled by Soviet scientists. In total, about fifty dialects and dialects were revealed, slightly differing in vocabulary and phonetic rules.
An extremely influential and ancient school specializing in the study of the cultures of Central Asia is located at St. Petersburg State University. There is a department of Iranian philology at the Oriental faculty, where Tajik translators are trained who are sensitive to all the differences between the dialects of the Persian language continuum.
Persian philology specialists are also trained at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and graduate and doctoral studies exist at several specialized institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, including the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts. Of great importance, the study of the Tajik language for Russia lies in the fact that the country has a large Tajik diaspora. Respect for national culture is important not only for the proper conduct of domestic policy, but also for the economy, and for the effective integration of migrants.