Tajik language

Tajik, Tajik Persian, Tajiki Persian, also called Tajiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by ethnic Tajiks. It is closely related to neighbouring Dari in Afghanistan, with which it forms a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of the Persian language. Several scholars consider Tajik to be a dialectal variety of Persian rather than a language in its own right. The question of whether Tajik and Persian should be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political aspects to it.

Through Early New Persian, Tajik, like Iranian Persian and Dari Persian, is a continuation of Middle Persian, the official administrative, religious, and literary language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC).

Tajiki is one of the two official languages of Tajikistan, the other being Russian, which serves as the official interethnic language. In Afghanistan, this language is less influenced by Turkic languages and is regarded as a form of Dari, which has co‑official status. The Tajiki Persian of Tajikistan has diverged from Persian as spoken in Afghanistan, and even more from that of Iran, owing to political borders, geographical isolation, standardisation processes, and the influence of Russian and neighbouring Turkic languages. The standard language is based on the north‑western dialects of Tajik (the region of the old major city of Samarqand), which have been somewhat influenced by the neighbouring Uzbek language as a result of geographical proximity. Tajik also retains numerous archaic elements in its vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar that have been lost elsewhere in the Persophone world, in part because of its relative isolation in the mountains of Central Asia.