Tajik

When Tajik changed alphabets

Before 1928 Tajik was written in the Arabic alphabet. It moved to the Latin script in 1928, and in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic the Latin script gave way to Cyrillic in 1939. The Cyrillic alphabet gained six extra letters, marked with diacritics. The 1989 law that made Tajik the state language also called for a gradual return of the Perso-Arabic alphabet, and it placed the word Farsi after Tajik. In 1999 the word Farsi was taken out of the state language law.

Why Samarkand speaks Tajik outside Tajikistan

Samarkand and Bukhara, cities central to Tajik history, lie in present-day Uzbekistan. Neither was included when the Tajik SSR was created in 1929, and Tajik is still the language of most of their people, though their speech diverges from the literary standard and most cannot read it. Almost every Tajik speaker in Bukhara is bilingual in Uzbek.

After 1929 many Tajiks from the Uzbek SSR moved to the new republic, particularly around Dushanbe. That is why literary Tajik rests on their north-western dialects, the speech of the Samarkand region, and not on the central dialects of Dushanbe itself. The balance has since tilted south: public officials now speak in the Kulob dialect, which is also heard in broadcasting.

What the mountains preserved

Tajik keeps words long gone from the Persian of Iran and Afghanistan, such as arziz, 'tin', and farbeh, 'fat'. Russian is the main modern source of loanwords, especially in economics, technology and government. Since the late 1980s there has been an effort to replace loanwords with native equivalents, drawn from old words that had fallen out of use or coined anew, some from Iranian Persian. Contact with media from Iran and Afghanistan after the Soviet period has brought the Persian varieties closer together.