The Vanji language, also spelt Vanchi and Vanži, is an extinct

Iranian Iranian may refer to: * Iran, a sovereign state * Iranian peoples, the speakers of the Iranian languages. The term Iranic peoples is also used for this term to distinguish the pan ethnic term from Iranian, used for the people of Iran * Iranian lan ...

language, one of the areal group of

Pamir languages The Pamir languages are an areal group of the Eastern Iranian languages, spoken by numerous people in the Pamir Mountains, primarily along the Panj River and its tributaries. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pamir language family was ...

. It was spoken in the

Vanj River The Vanj ( tg, Ванҷ, russian: Ванч ''Vanch'') is a river in east Tajikistan. It is a right tributary of the Panj in Vanj District, north-western Gorno-Badakhshan. The river is long and has a basin area of .Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region Gorno-Badakhshan, officially the Badakhshan Mountainous Autonomous Region,, abbr. / is an autonomous region in eastern Tajikistan, in the Pamir Mountains. It makes up nearly forty-five percent of the country's land area, but only two percen ...

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

. In the 19th century the region was forcibly annexed to the

Bukharan Emirate The Emirate of Bukhara ( fa, , Amārat-e Bokhārā, chg, , Bukhārā Amirligi) was a Muslim polity in Central Asia that existed from 1785 to 1920 in what is modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. It occupied the land ...

and a campaign of violent assimilation undertaken, and by the end of the 19th century, the Vanji language had completely disappeared, displaced by Tajik Persian as a result of assimilation.

Documentation

The Russian linguist

Ivan Ivanovich Zarubin Ivan Ivanovich Zarubin ( rus, Иван Иванович Зарубин; 27 September 1887 – 3 February 1964) was a Soviet specialist of Iranian languages, particularly Pamir languages. Life Zarubin was born in 1887.Paul Bergne The Birth of Ta ...

was the first to assess the language in the early 20th century, by which time it was already extinct. Zarubin was able to collect only words and phrases recalled by older inhabitants of the region as having been spoken by their grandparents who still knew something of the language, and he considered it one of the Pamir languages.

Features

The language as reconstructedLashkarbekov, B. B, ''Старованджский язык'', Moscow (2008), quoted in ''Problem of Archaism and Innovation in the Eastern Iranian Languages'', Ľubomír Novák, 2013 had a phonology consisting of the

stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), li ...

s p, b, t, d, k, g and q, the

fricative consonant A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

s f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, x, ɣ, χ, ʁ and h, the

affricate consonant An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...

s t͡ʃ and d͡ʒ and the

sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels ar ...

s m, w, n, r, l, j and ŋ as well as the vowels a, e, ẹ, i, ə, o, ü and u. Much less can be discerned about the grammar of Vanji: there were probably two

genders Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures us ...

, masculine and feminine, with plurals of nouns formed by adding a suffix ''-ev'',

comparative general linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality or degree - see also comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as well ...

forms of adjectives by adding ''-tar'' and

Infinitive Infinitive ( abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is de ...

s of verbs were formed by adding ''-ak''.

References

* Pamir languages Eastern Iranian languages Languages of Tajikistan Extinct languages of Asia Languages extinct in the 19th century {{ie-lang-stub