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. 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 (river), Panj in Vanj District, north-western Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, Gorno-Badakhshan. The river is long and has ...

valley in what is now the

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 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 T ...

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 consonants p, b, t, d, k, g and q, the fricative consonants f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, x, ɣ, χ, ʁ and h, the affricate consonants t͡ʃ and d͡ʒ and the sonorants 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, 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 deri ...

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