The state language of Tajikistan is Tajik. Linguists refer it to the Iranian group of Indo-European languages. The total number of people speaking it is estimated by experts at 8.5 million. Disputes about its status have not subsided around the Tajik language for a hundred years: is it a language or an ethnic subspecies of Persian? Of course, the issue is political.
Question about ownership of the Tajik language
The creation of the Tajik language began during the reign of Soviet power. A public figure, writer and philologist Sadriddin Aini took an active part in defending its independence and analyzing its differences from Persian and Dari.
Today, in Central Asia, there is a New Persian continuum that has spread from Iran to the Afghan-Pakistani border. It is customary to call a continuum all peoples who are able to understand each other and speak the language of one family. It has been established that Tajiks and Persian-speakingthe inhabitants of Afghanistan and Iran still have not lost the opportunity to understand each other.
Political language question
The emergence of its own dialect in Tajikistan was the result of an active policy to create national identities that could resist foreign influence. For example, within the framework of one of the directions, the Circassian ethnos was divided into several sub-ethnoses, each of which had its own language and national republic. Often several different peoples 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 among the people of Tajikistan, different from the Persian-speaking inhabitants of Afghanistan and Iranians, a separate language was created with its own script and vocabulary.
Despite the apparent differences between Iranian dialects, Tajik translators can understand Dari speakers, and sometimes those who speak Farsi.
History of language
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 denote the literary dialect understood by all the inhabitants of the former Bactria and Sogdiana.
The language that existed in the territoryCentral Asia at the beginning of the 20th century, traced its genealogy to the Middle Persian Koine, which served as the lingua franca for the urban inhabitants of the Persian Empire and its neighboring states, starting with Vlll.
In the 10th century, Islam began to actively spread throughout Asia, and the New Persian dialect, Dari, became the main language of Islamic preaching for several centuries. It displaces the Sogdian and Bactrian, the relics of which have survived to this day only in the remote mountainous regions of the Pamirs. Thus, the modern language of Tajikistan is the heir to the great New Persian language, which brought a new religion and Islamic enlightenment to Central Asia.
Spreading the language
Having found out what language is spoken in Tajikistan, let's turn to neighboring states, as they also have speakers of Persian dialects. In addition to Tajikistan, Tajik is also spoken in several interior regions of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. But, despite a significant number of people speaking this language, it is not official in any other republic of Central Asia. True, there are large educational centers in Bukhara and Samarkand that teach and teach Tajik.
In Tajikistan itself, the language is far from spread throughout the entire territory, since in a significant part of the country the inhabitants speak several Pamir dialects, which are the heirs of the ancient Asian languages of Sogdiana and Bactria.
Diaspora and dialects
It is worth notingthat Tajik is not homogeneous: it has many dialects, a detailed description of which was compiled by Soviet scientists. In total, about fifty dialects and dialects were identified, 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. At the Oriental Faculty there is a department of Iranian philology, where Tajik translators are trained, who subtly feel all the differences between the dialects of the Persian language continuum.
Specialists in Persian philology are also trained at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and postgraduate and doctoral studies exist at several specialized institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, including the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts. The study of the language of Tajikistan is of great importance for Russia because there is a large diaspora of Tajiks in the country. Respect for national culture is important not only for the proper conduct of domestic politics, but also for the economy and for the effective integration of migrants.
