Tajik, the mountain Persian that kept words the rest of Iran lost
Tajik is Persian as spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, close enough to Afghanistan's Dari to be mutually intelligible. Isolated in Central Asian mountains and exposed to Russian and Uzbek, it drifted from the Persian of Iran while holding on to archaic words, sounds and grammar lost elsewhere.
Like the Persian of Iran and Afghanistan, it descends through Early New Persian from Middle Persian, the language of the Sasanian Empire of 224 to 651 CE, and ultimately from the Old Persian of the Achaemenids. Until the 19th century its speakers had no separate name for it and simply said they spoke Farsi; for much of the 20th century the Russian spelling Tadzhik was used. Whether Tajik is a language or a Persian dialect remains partly a political question.
In 1989, amid rising nationalism, a law made Tajik the state language, equated it with Persian by adding the word Farsi, and called for gradually restoring the Perso-Arabic alphabet; Farsi was dropped from the law in 1999. Today Tajik shares official status with Russian, which serves as the language between ethnic groups, and the standard is based on northwestern dialects around Samarqand, somewhat coloured by Uzbek.
Samarkand and Bukhara, though inside Uzbekistan, remain strongly Tajik-speaking, and virtually all Tajik speakers in Bukhara also speak Uzbek, which has reshaped their grammar and pronunciation. Richard Foltz notes that most people there speak dialects far from the literary standard and cannot read it. Official Uzbek figures put Tajiks at 5 percent of the population, a count that omits those who register as Uzbeks. The Bukharan Jews speak their own northern variety, Bukhori.
Tajiks make up 80 percent of Tajikistan's population and between 25 and 35 percent of Afghanistan's, where their speech is written in the Persian alphabet and called Dari; roughly 48 to 58 percent of Afghans speak Dari natively. Economic hardship sends about one million Tajik men abroad each year to work in Russia.
Source: Tajik language
