The Farsi-Tajiki or Tajiki language, the name given to one of the Iranian languages spoken in Central Asia, is also called Persian, Tajik, or Tajik Persian. This variety of names reflects the winding, and complicated history of the language.
Forms of New Persian
Farsi-Tajiki belongs to the Western branch of the Iranian language group (of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family), in which it is usually classified as New Persian. Today there are three standardized forms of New Persian: Farsi-Tajiki, Farsi, and Dari. In their standard forms, these three are to a large extent identical, although there are many regional spoken variants, which may differ consider- ably from the standard forms. Since 1989, Farsi-Tajiki has been the official language of Tajikistan, but it is also spoken in large parts of the neighboring republic of Uzbekistan and in Afghanistan. Farsi is the official language of Iran, and Dari the official language of Afghanistan.
History of Farsi-Tajiki
Farsi means “Persian,” and Tajiki is derived from Tajik, a word with an obscure etymology, once implying “Muslim,” but nowadays referring to the peo- ple of the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan. Farsi-Tajiki evolved from the classical New Persian language that gradually emerged as a new written language, replacing Middle Persian and other Iranian languages in the centuries following the Muslim Arabs’ conquest of Iran and Central Asia in the seventh cen- tury. (Iranian languages had long been spoken in Cen- tral Asia.) Classical New Persian, like the modern New Persian (Farsi) of today, is written in an adaptation of the Arabic script and is characterized by a large num- ber of loanwords from Arabic. Farsi-Tajiki also has a relatively large number of Turkic loanwords. With the coming of the Turkic tribes from the tenth century on, Turkic languages, such as Uzbek, gradually su- perseded the Iranian languages once spoken in the area of Central Asia. More recently, Russian has deeply in- fluenced Farsi-Tajiki.
The term “Tajik” began to be used widely from the sixteenth century onward to refer to speakers of New Persian in the area of the Oxus River (the modern Amu Dar’ya, in central and western Central Asia) basin and present-day northeastern Afghanistan, to distinguish them from speakers of Turkic languages in that area. The expansion of Turkic peoples, mainly Uzbeks and Turkmen, from the north to the south of Central Asia, in combination with the stabilization of national fron- tiers in the sixteenth century, separated the Iranians of the Iranian plateau from the Iranians to the north- east. From then on, the spoken Persian of the north- east developed separately from that of Iran.
However, the written Persian, in use for administrative and literary purposes in India as well as Central Asia, remained the same as the Persian used in Iran un- til the first quarter of the twentieth century. This lan- guage was called Farsi or Parsi (Persian, or more specifically New Persian) in the whole of the Iranian cultural area, which stretched from India to western modern Iran. The term “Farsi-Tajiki” or “Tajiki” came into use under Soviet influence around 1925.
Emergence of Farsi-Tajiki
The development of standard Farsi-Tajiki was in- stigated by the poet and novelist Sadriddin Aini (1878– 1954), considered the founder of modern Tajik litera- ture. He was trained in the medieval cloisters of a Bukharan madrasah (Muslim religious school), but he used his talents in the service of reform and revolution.
When Soviet rule was established in Central Asia in the 1920s, it was decided that the region should be di- vided into national republics. The republics were named after their dominant ethnic groups, whose lan- guages had to be developed as tools for educating the proletariat. This division into national republics was artificial, not only since there were many more ethnic groups than national republics, but also because different ethnic groups had been living together in the same areas for centuries. A seemingly neat division was nevertheless carried through, and the newly appointed national languages were turned into modern Soviet-era languages by introducing elements from the vernacu- lar to replace classical expressions. Sadriddin Aini was among the intellectuals who created the reformed Per- sian, which was called Tajiki. Aini apparently invented the term “Farsi-Tajiki,” to mark the language’s close relationship with the classical Persian heritage and with the Persian spoken in Iran and Afghanistan. Although this language was based on the spoken forms of Per- sian around Bukhara and Samarqand in present-day Uzbekistan, it was imposed as a new literary language on the inhabitants of the newly founded republic of Tajikistan, which was situated farther east and did not include Bukhara and Samarqand, the Tajik centers of old. Until then the area of Tajikistan had been only sparsely populated, and those who lived there mainly spoke different forms of Tadjiki or other Iranian languages, although Uzbek and Kirghiz were also spoken in western and northern present-day Tajikistan.
One of the first steps in transforming the allegedly old-fashioned and feudal image of the Persian lan- guage used in Central Asia was the adoption of a new alphabet. First, around 1930, the Latin alphabet was adopted. In 1940 the introduction of a modified Cyril- lic alphabet facilitated the adoption of many Russian loan words, and the Russian language gradually gained importance in Tajikistan, marginalizing and Russian- izing Farsi-Tajiki. This process ended in the late 1980s under the influence of glasnost and perestroika.
Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the people of Tajikistan have tried to reintro- duce the Arabo-Persian script and to decrease the use of Russian and Russian loan words in Tajiki. However, so far the poor economic situation prohibits an effec- tive reintroduction.
In short, Farsi-Tajiki in its present form is a relatively new language, but it has a long history. Its direct ancestor is classical New Persian, which had been spoken in Central Asia since the emergence of Islam. Whereas the Soviets increasingly tended to isolate Farsi-Tajiki from the Persian (Farsi) of Iran and Afghanistan, since independence Tajiks have tried to emphasize Farsi-Tajiki’s similarity to Farsi and Dari. Both Farsi-Tajiki and Farsi have a common heritage, although political and historical circumstances through the centuries have resulted in considerable differences in grammar and vocabulary, particularly in colloquial language.
Gabrielle Van den Berg,
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN ASIA
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Further Reading:
Lazard, Gilbert. (1970) “Persian and Tajik.” In Current Trends in Linguistics, 6, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok. The Hague, Netherlands, and Paris: Mouton, 64–96.
———. (1975) “The Rise of the New Persian Language.” In The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 4, edited by R. N. Frye. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 595–633.
Perry, John R., and Rachel Lehr. (1998) The Sands of the Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda.
Rastorgueva, Vera Sergeevna. (1963) A Short Sketch of Tajik Grammar. Trans. by Herbert Paper. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Center for Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics.
Rzehak, Lutz. (1999) Tadschikische Studiengrammatik. Wies- baden, Germany: Reichert Verlag.
Schmitt, Rüdiger. (1989) Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum (Iranian Language Compendium). Wiesbaden, Germany: Reichert Verlag.
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