Tajik (Tajik: , , ), also called Tajiki Persian (Tajik: , , ) or Tajiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in

Tajikistan Tajikistan (, ; tg, Тоҷикистон, Tojikiston; russian: Таджикистан, Tadzhikistan), officially the Republic of Tajikistan ( tg, Ҷумҳурии Тоҷикистон, Jumhurii Tojikiston), is a landlocked country in Centr ...

and

Uzbekistan Uzbekistan (, ; uz, Ozbekiston, italic=yes / , ; russian: Узбекистан), officially the Republic of Uzbekistan ( uz, Ozbekiston Respublikasi, italic=yes / ; russian: Республика Узбекистан), is a doubly landlocked co ...

by Tajiks. It is closely related to neighbouring

Dari Dari (, , ), also known as Dari Persian (, ), is the variety of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the term officially recognised and promoted since 1964 by the Afghan government for the Persian language,Lazard, G.Darī ...

with which it forms a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of the

Persian language Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken an ...

. Several scholars consider Tajik as a dialectal variety of Persian rather than a language on its own. The popularity of this conception of Tajik as a variety of Persian was such that, during the period in which Tajik intellectuals were trying to establish Tajik as a language separate from Persian, prominent intellectual Sadriddin Ayni counterargued that Tajik was not a "bastardised dialect" of Persian.Shinji ldo
Tajik
Published by UN COM GmbH 2005 (LINCOM EUROPA) 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. By way of Early New Persian, Tajik, like

Iranian Persian Iranian Persian, Western Persian or Western Farsi, natively simply known as Persian (, ), refers to the varieties of the modern Persian language spoken in Iran and by minorities in neighboring countries, as well as by Iranian communities th ...

and Dari Persian, is a continuation of

Middle Persian Middle Persian or Pahlavi, also known by its endonym Pārsīk or Pārsīg () in its later form, is a Western Middle Iranian language which became the literary language of the Sasanian Empire. For some time after the Sasanian collapse, Middle P ...

, the official religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenids (550–330 BC). Frye, R. N., "Darī", '' The Encyclopaedia of Islam'', Brill Publications, CD version Tajik is one of the two official languages of Tajikistan, the other being Russian as the official interethnic language. In

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is borde ...

(where the Tajik minority forms the principal part of the wider Persophone population), this language is less influenced by

Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turki ...

, is regarded as a form of

, and as such, has co-official language status. The Tajik of Tajikistan has diverged from Persian as spoken in Afghanistan and

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

due to political borders, geographical isolation, the standardisation process and the influence of Russian and neighbouring Turkic languages. The standard language is based on the northwestern dialects of Tajik (region of the old major city of

Samarqand fa, سمرقند , native_name_lang = , settlement_type = City , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from the top:Registan square, Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, Bibi-Khanym Mosque, view inside Shah-i-Zinda, ...

), which have been somewhat influenced by the neighbouring 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 Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes the fo ...

Name

Up to and including the nineteenth century, speakers in Afghanistan and Central Asia had no separate name for the language and simply regarded themselves as speaking ''Farsi'', which is the endonym for the Persian language. The term ''Tajik'', derived from the Persian for "foreigner", was an exonym used by Turkic speakers to refer to Persian speakers (the word Tat has a similar origin), although it has been adopted by the speakers themselves. In 1989, with the growth in Tajik nationalism, a law was enacted declaring Tajik the state (national) language, with Russian being the

official language An official language is a language given supreme status in a particular country, state, or other jurisdiction. Typically the term "official language" does not refer to the language used by a people or country, but by its government (e.g. judiciary, ...

(as throughout the Union). In addition, the law officially equated Tajik with Persian, placing the word ''Farsi'' (the endonym for the Persian language) after Tajik. The law also called for a gradual reintroduction of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. In 1999, the word ''Farsi'' was removed from the state language law.

Geographical distribution

The most important cities of

— Samarkand and Bukhara—are in present-day

, where ethnic Tajiks comprise a majority.B. Rezvani: "Ethno-territorial conflict and coexistence in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Fereydan. Appendix 4: Tajik population in Uzbekistan"

. Dissertation. Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam. 2013 Paul Bergne: ''The Birth of Tajikistan. National Identity and the Origins of the Republic''. International Library of Central Asia Studies. I.B. Tauris. 2007. Pg. 106 Today, virtually all Tajik speakers in Bukhara are bilingual in Tajik and Uzbek. This Tajik–Uzbek bilingualism has had a strong influence on the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Bukharan Tajik. Tajiks are also found in large numbers in the Surxondaryo Region in the south and along Uzbekistan's eastern border with Tajikistan. Tajik is still widely spoken in Samarkand and Bukhara today. Writing in 1996, Richard Foltz estimated that Tajiks might account for perhaps 70% of the total population of Samarqand and as much as 90% of Bukhara.Richard Foltz, "The Tajiks of Uzbekistan", ''Central Asian Survey'', 15(2), 213-216 (1996). Later demographical trends are not clear. Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community comprises 5% of the nation's total population. However, these numbers do not include ethnic Tajiks who, for a variety of reasons, choose to identify themselves as Uzbeks in population census forms. During the Soviet "

Uzbekisation Uzbekisation or Uzbekization is the process of something or someone culturally non-Uzbek becoming, or being forced to become, Uzbek. The term is often used to describe the process by which the autonomous republic Tajik ASSR was incorporated with ...

" supervised by Sharof Rashidov, the head of the Uzbek Communist Party, Tajiks had to choose either to stay in Uzbekistan and get registered as Uzbek in their passports or leave the republic for the less-developed agricultural and mountainous Tajikistan. The "Uzbekisation" movement ended in 1924. In 1996, Richard Foltz estimated that Tajiks might make up 25%-35% of Uzbekistan's population. Later demographical trends are not clear. Tajiks constitute 80% of Tajikistan's population and the language dominates in most parts of the country. Some Tajiks in Gorno-Badakhshan in southeastern Tajikistan, where the Pamir languages are the native languages of most residents, are bilingual. Tajiks are the dominant ethnic group in Northern Afghanistan as well and are also the majority group in scattered pockets elsewhere in the country, particularly urban areas such as Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz,

Ghazni Ghazni ( prs, غزنی, ps, غزني), historically known as Ghaznain () or Ghazna (), also transliterated as Ghuznee, and anciently known as Alexandria in Opiana ( gr, Αλεξάνδρεια Ωπιανή), is a city in southeastern Afghanistan ...

, and Herat. Tajiks constitute between 25% and 35% of the total population of the country. In Afghanistan, the dialects spoken by ethnic Tajiks are written using the Persian alphabet and referred to as

, along with the dialects of other groups in Afghanistan such as the Hazaragi and

Aimaq dialect Aimaq or Aimaqi ( fa, ایماقی, Aimāqi) is the dominant eastern Persian ethnolect spoken by the Aimaq people in central northwest Afghanistan (west of the Hazarajat) and eastern Iran. It is close to the Dari varieties of Persian. The Aimaq pe ...

s. Approximately 48%-58% of Afghan citizens are native speakers of Dari. A large Tajik-speaking diaspora exists due to the instability that has plagued Central Asia in recent years, with significant numbers of Tajiks found in

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-ei ...

, Kazakhstan, and beyond. This Tajik diaspora is also the result of the poor state of the economy of Tajikistan and each year approximately one million men leave Tajikistan to gain employment in Russia.

Dialects

Tajik dialects can be approximately split into the following groups: # Northern dialects ( Northern Tajikistan, Bukhara, Samarkand, Kyrgyzstan, and the Varzob valley region of

Dushanbe Dushanbe ( tg, Душанбе, ; ; russian: Душанбе) is the capital and largest city of Tajikistan. , Dushanbe had a population of 863,400 and that population was largely Tajik. Until 1929, the city was known in Russian as Dyushambe (ru ...

).Windfuhr, Gernot. "Persian and Tajik." The Iranian Languages. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 421 # Central dialects (dialects of the upper Zarafshan Valley) # Southern dialects (South and East of

, Kulob, and the Rasht region of Tajikistan) # Southeastern dialects (dialects of the Darvoz region and the

Amu Darya The Amu Darya, tk, Amyderýa/ uz, Amudaryo// tg, Амударё, Amudaryo ps, , tr, Ceyhun / Amu Derya grc, Ὦξος, Ôxos (also called the Amu, Amo River and historically known by its Latin name or Greek ) is a major river in Central Asi ...

near Rushon) The dialect used by the Bukharan Jews of Central Asia is known as the Bukhori dialect and belongs to the northern dialect grouping. It is chiefly distinguished by the inclusion of

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

terms, principally religious vocabulary, and historical use of the

Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewi ...

. Despite these differences, Bukhori is readily intelligible to other Tajik speakers, particularly speakers of northern dialects. Абче A very important moment in the development of the contemporary Tajik, especially of the spoken language, is the tendency in changing its dialectal orientation. The dialects of Northern Tajikistan were the foundation of the prevalent standard Tajik, while the Southern dialects did not enjoy either popularity or prestige. Now all politicians and public officials make their speeches in the Kulob dialect, which is also used in broadcasting.

Phonology

Vowels

The table below lists the six vowel phonemes in standard, literary Tajik. Letters from the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet are given first, followed by IPA transcription. Local dialects frequently have more than the six seen below. In northern and Uzbek dialects, classical has chain shifted forward in the mouth to . In central and southern dialects, classical has chain shifted upward and merged into . The open back vowel has varyingly been described as mid-back , , and . It is analogous to standard Persian ''â'' (long ''a''). The vowel ⟨Ӣ ӣ⟩ usually represents a stressed /i/ at the end of a word. However not all instances of ⟨Ӣ ӣ⟩ are stressed because the second person singular suffix -ӣ is unstressed. the vowels /i/, /u/ and /a/ are reduced to �in unstressed syllables.

Consonants

The Tajik language contains 24 consonants, 16 of which form contrastive pairs by voicing: �/п �/ф �/т �/с �/ш �/ч �/к �/х The table below lists the consonant phonemes in standard, literary Tajik. Letters from the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet are given first, followed by IPA transcription.

Word stress

Word stress generally falls on the first syllable in finite verb forms and on the last syllable in nouns and noun-like words. Examples of where stress does not fall on the last syllable are adverbs like: бале (''bale'', meaning "yes") and зеро (''zero'', meaning "because"). Stress also does not fall on

enclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

s, nor on the marker of the direct object.

Grammar

The word order of Tajiki Persian is subject–object–verb. Tajik Persian grammar is similar to the classical Persian grammar (and the grammar of modern varieties such as Iranian Persian). The most notable difference between classical Persian grammar and Tajik Persian grammar is the construction of the present progressive tense in each language. In Tajik, the present progressive form consists of a present progressive participle, from the verb истодан, ''istodan'', 'to stand' and a cliticised form of the verb -acт, ''-ast'', 'to be'. In Iranian Persian, the present progressive form consists of the verb دار, ''dār'', 'to have' followed by a conjugated verb in either the simple present tense, the habitual past tense or the habitual past perfect tense.

Nouns

Nouns are not marked for

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...

, although they are marked for number. Two forms of number exist in Tajik, singular and plural. The plural is marked by either the suffix -ҳо, ''-ho'' or -он, ''-on'' (with contextual variants -ён, ''-yon'' and -гон, ''-gon''), although Arabic loan words may use Arabic forms. There is no definite article, but the indefinite article exists in the form of the number "one" як, ''yak'' and -е, ''-e'', the first positioned before the noun and the second joining the noun as a suffix. When a noun is used as a

direct object In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include b ...

, it is marked by the suffix -ро, ''-ro'', e.g. Рустамро задам (''Rustam-ro zadam''), "I hit Rustam". This direct object suffix is added to the word after any plural suffixes. The form -ро can be literary or formal. In older forms of the Persian language, -ро could indicate both direct and indirect objects and some phrases used in modern Persian and Tajik have maintained this suffix on indirect objects, as seen in the following example: (Худоро шукр, ''Xudo-ro šukr'' - "Thank God"). Modern Persian does not use the direct object marker as a suffix on the noun, but rather, as a stand-alone

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

Prepositions

Vocabulary

Tajik is conservative in its vocabulary, retaining numerous terms that have long since fallen into disuse in Iran and Afghanistan, such as арзиз (''arziz''), meaning "tin" and фарбеҳ (''farbeh''), meaning "fat". Most modern loan words in Tajik come from Russian as a result of the position of Tajikistan within the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

. The vast majority of these Russian loanwords which have entered the Tajik language through the fields of socioeconomics, technology and government, where most of the concepts and vocabulary of these fields have been borrowed from the Russian language. The introduction of Russian loanwords into the Tajik language was largely justified under the

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

policy of modernisation and the necessary subordination of all languages to Russian for the achievement of a Communist state. Vocabulary also comes from the geographically close Uzbek language and, as is usual in

Islam Islam (; ar, ۘالِإسلَام, , ) is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion centred primarily around the Quran, a religious text considered by Muslims to be the direct word of God (or '' Allah'') as it was revealed to Muhammad, the ...

ic countries, from

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

. Since the late 1980s, an effort has been made to replace loanwords with native equivalents, using either old terms that had fallen out of use or coined terminology (including from Iranian Persian). Many of the coined terms for modern items such as гармкунак (''garmkunak''), meaning 'heater' and чангкашак (''čangkašak''), meaning 'vacuum cleaner' differ from their Afghan and Iranian equivalents, adding to the difficulty in intelligibility between Tajik and other forms of Persian. In the table below, Persian refers to the standard language of Iran, which differs somewhat from the Dari Persian of Afghanistan. Two other Iranian languages,

Pashto Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani (). Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official langua ...

and Kurdish (Kurmanji), have also been included for comparative purposes.

Writing system

In Tajikistan and other countries of the former

, Tajik Persian is currently written in

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...

, although it was written in the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern ...

beginning in 1928 and the Arabic alphabet prior to 1928. In the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, the use of the Latin script was later replaced in 1939 by the Cyrillic script. The Tajik alphabet added six additional letters to the Cyrillic script inventory and these additional letters are distinguished in the Tajik orthography by the use of diacritics.Windfuhr, Gernot. "Persian and Tajik." The Iranian Languages. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. 423.

History

According to many scholars, the New Persian language (which subsequently evolved into the Persian forms spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan) developed in Transoxiana and

Khorasan Khorasan may refer to: * Greater Khorasan, a historical region which lies mostly in modern-day northern/northwestern Afghanistan, northeastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan * Khorasan Province, a pre-2004 province of Ira ...

, in what are today parts of Afghanistan, Iran,

and Tajikistan. While the New Persian language was descended primarily from

, it also incorporated substantial elements of other

Iranian languages The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau. The Iranian languages are groupe ...

of ancient Central Asia, such as Sogdian. Following the

Arab The Arabs (singular: Arab; singular ar, عَرَبِيٌّ, DIN 31635: , , plural ar, عَرَب, DIN 31635: , Arabic pronunciation: ), also known as the Arab people, are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in Western Asia, ...

conquest of Iran and most of Central Asia in the 8th century AD,

for a time became the court language and Persian and other Iranian languages were relegated to the private sphere. In the 9th century AD, following the rise of the Samanids, whose state was centered around the cities of Bukhoro (

Buxoro Bukhara ( Uzbek: /, ; tg, Бухоро, ) is the seventh-largest city in Uzbekistan, with a population of 280,187 , and the capital of Bukhara Region. People have inhabited the region around Bukhara for at least five millennia, and the city ...

and Herat and covered much of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and northeastern Iran, New Persian emerged as the court language and swiftly displaced Arabic. Arabic influence continued to show itself in the form of the

Perso-Arabic script The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran ( Western Persian) and Afghanistan ( Dari Persian) since the 7th ce ...

used to write the language (replaced in Tajik by Latin and then Cyrillic in the 20th century) and a large number of Arabic loanwords. New Persian became the lingua franca of Central Asia for centuries, although it eventually lost ground to the

Chaghatai language Chagatai (چغتای, ''Čaġatāy''), also known as ''Turki'', Eastern Turkic, or Chagatai Turkic (''Čaġatāy türkīsi''), is an extinct Turkic literary language that was once widely spoken across Central Asia and remained the shared litera ...

in much of its former domains as a growing number of Turkic tribes moved into the region from the east. Since the 16th century AD, Tajik has come under increasing pressure from neighbouring

. Once spoken in areas of

Turkmenistan Turkmenistan ( or ; tk, Türkmenistan / Түркменистан, ) is a country located in Central Asia, bordered by Kazakhstan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, east and northeast, Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the s ...

, such as

Merv Merv ( tk, Merw, ', مرو; fa, مرو, ''Marv''), also known as the Merve Oasis, formerly known as Alexandria ( grc-gre, Ἀλεξάνδρεια), Antiochia in Margiana ( grc-gre, Ἀντιόχεια ἡ ἐν τῇ Μαργιανῇ) and ...

, Tajik is today virtually non-existent in that country. Uzbek has also largely replaced Tajik in most areas of modern Uzbekistan – the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War ...

in particular implemented Turkification among Tajiks in Ferghana and Samarqand, replacing the dominant language in those areas with Uzbek. Nevertheless, Tajik persisted in pockets, notably in Samarqand, Bukhoro and Surxondaryo Region, as well as in much of what is today Tajikistan. The creation of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic within the

in 1929 helped to safeguard the future of Tajik, as it became an official language of the republic alongside Russian. Still, substantial numbers of Tajik-speakers remained outside the borders of the republic, mostly in the neighbouring Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, which created a source of tension between Tajiks and Uzbeks. Neither Samarqand nor Bukhoro was included in the nascent Tajik S.S.R., despite their immense historical importance in Tajik history. After the creation of the Tajik SSR, a large number of ethnic Tajiks from the Uzbek SSR migrated there, particularly to the region of the capital,

, exercising a substantial influence in the republic's political, cultural and economic life. The influence of this influx of ethnic Tajik immigrants from the Uzbek SSR is most prominently manifested in the fact that literary Tajik is based on their northwestern dialects of the language, rather than the central dialects that are spoken by the natives in the Dushanbe region and adjacent areas. After the fall of the Soviet Union and Tajikistan's independence in 1991, the government of Tajikistan has made substantial efforts to promote the use of Tajik in all spheres of public and private life. Tajik is gaining ground among the once- Russified upper classes and continues its role as the vernacular of the majority of the country's population. There has been a rise in the number of Tajik publications. Increasing contact with media from Iran and Afghanistan, after decades of isolation under the Soviets, is also having an effect on the development of the language.

Notes

References

* Azim Baizoyev, John Hayward
A beginner's guide to Tajiki
- 1. publ. - London . a. RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. (includes a Tajiki-English Dictionary) * Ido, S. (2005) ''Tajik'' * Korotow, M. (2004) ''Tadschikisch Wort für Wort. Kauderwelsch'' * Lazard, G. (1956) "Caractères distinctifs de la langue tadjik". ''Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris''. 52. pp. 117–186 * Lazard, G. "Le Persan". ''Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum''. Wiesbaden. 1989. * Windfuhr, G. (1987) in Comrie, B. (ed.) "Persian". ''The World's Major Languages''. pp. 523–546 * Perry, J. R. (2005) ''A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar'' (Boston : Brill) * Rastorgueva, V. (1963) ''A Short Sketch of Tajik Grammar'' (Netherlands : Mouton) * Назарзода, С. – Сангинов, А. – Каримов, С. – Султон, М. Ҳ. (2008) ''Фарҳанги тафсирии забони тоҷикӣ (иборат аз ду ҷилд)
Ҷилди I. А – Н.Ҷилди II. О – Я.
' (Душанбе). * Khojayori, Nasrullo, and Mikael Thompson. ''Tajiki Reference Grammar for Beginners''. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2009. * Windfuhr, Gernot. "Persian and Tajik." ''The Iranian Languages''. New York, NY: Routledge, 2009. * Windfuhr, Gernot. Persian Grammar: History and State of Its Study. De Gruyter, 1979. Trends in Linguistics. State-Of-The-Art Reports. * Marashi, Mehdi, and Mohammad Ali Jazayery. Persian Studies in North America: Studies in Honor of Mohammad Ali Jazayery. Bethesda, MD: Iran, 1994.

External links

Tajiki Cyrillic to Persian alphabet converter

A Worldwide Community for Tajiks

Tajik Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words
(from Wiktionary'
Swadesh-list appendix

BBC news in Tajik

English-Tajik-Russian Dictionary

Free Online Tajik Dictionary

Welcome to Tajikistan

Численность населения Республики Таджикистан на 1 января 2015 года. Сообщение Агентства по статистике при Президенте Республики Таджикистан

A news clip about a Dushanbe book exhibition, with examples of various members of the public speaking Tajiki. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tajik Language Languages of Afghanistan Languages of Kazakhstan Languages of Kyrgyzstan Languages of Russia Languages of China Languages of Tajikistan Languages of Turkmenistan Languages of Uzbekistan Languages of Pakistan Persian dialects and varieties Subject–object–verb languages