Languages

Tajikistan borders Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and China, and is the smallest country in Central Asia. Its languages follow those borders closely: a Persian state language, a Turkic presence in the north and east, Russian left over from the Soviet period, and a cluster of much older languages in the eastern mountains.

The Official Language: Tajik#

The official language is Tajik, a variety of Persian and therefore a Western Iranian language, closely related to the Persian of Iran and the Dari of Afghanistan. A Tajik speaker and a Tehrani can largely understand one another, though the vocabularies have diverged, with Tajik taking in a substantial number of Russian and Turkic words.

Tajik is spoken by around 85% of the population, making it by far the most widely used language in the country. It is written in Cyrillic, introduced under Soviet rule in place of the Perso-Arabic script used previously. Proposals to return to the Perso-Arabic alphabet were raised around independence in 1991 but were never carried through, and Cyrillic remains the script in everyday and official use.

Other Languages Spoken in Tajikistan#

Several other languages are spoken alongside Tajik.

• Russian: widely spoken, particularly among older people who learned it during the Soviet era, and estimated at around 25% of the population. It retains a recognised role in government, business and education, and remains useful to the many Tajiks who work in Russia.
• Uzbek: a Turkic language spoken by around 8% of the population, mainly in the north near the Uzbekistan border.
• Kyrgyz: another Turkic language, spoken by around 1% of the population in the mountainous districts near the Kyrgyzstan border.
• The Pamiri languages: a group of Eastern Iranian languages including Shughni, Rushani and Wakhi, spoken in the eastern Pamirs. They are not mutually intelligible with Tajik, and several are spoken by only a few thousand people.
• Arabic: a Semitic language used by a small number of people, largely in religious contexts and within the Ismaili community.
• Tatar: a Turkic language spoken within the small Tatar community.

The distribution is a reasonable map of the country's history. Persian came with the Samanids and stayed, Turkic languages arrived with movement from the steppe, Russian arrived with the empire and then the union, and the Pamiri languages survived in the valleys that were hardest to reach.