Tajiki

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.