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

Iranian Iranian () may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Iran ** Iranian diaspora, Iranians living outside Iran ** Iranian architecture, architecture of Iran and parts of the rest of West Asia ** Iranian cuisine, cooking traditions and practic ...

language, one of the areal group of

Iranian languages The Iranian languages, also called the 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 langu ...

. It was spoken in the

Vanj River The Vanj (, ''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, 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 percent of its popul ...

Tajikistan Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan, is a landlocked country in Central Asia. Dushanbe is the capital city, capital and most populous city. Tajikistan borders Afghanistan to the Afghanistan–Tajikistan border, south, Uzbekistan to ...

. There are only 64 known words. In the 19th century the region was forcibly annexed to the

Bukharan Emirate The Emirate of Bukhara (, ) was a Muslim- Uzbek polity in Central Asia that existed from 1785 to 1920 in what is now Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. It occupied the land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, known former ...

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. The local dialect of Tajik Persian spoken in Vanj has some Vanji influence.

Documentation

The Russian linguist Ivan Ivanovich Zarubin 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.

Phonology

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 (, ), lip ...

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 ...

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 a ...

s m, w, n, r, l, j and ŋ as well as the vowels a, e, ẹ, i, ə, o, ü and u.

Grammar

Much less can be discerned about the grammar of Vanji: there were probably two

genders Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other than the ...

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

comparative The degrees of comparison of adjectives and adverbs are the various forms taken by adjectives and adverbs when used to compare two entities (comparative degree), three or more entities (superlative degree), or when not comparing entities (positi ...

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 that do not show a tense. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all ...

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