This small republic in the foothills of the Pamirs was formed in 1991 after seceding from the USSR. Tajik Constitution is legally recorded as the state language in Tajikistan, but Russian remains the language of interethnic communication among its inhabitants.
Some statistics and facts
- Tajikistan is the only country in former Soviet Central Asia whose language dates back to ancient Iranian and belongs to the Aryan branch of the Indo-European family.
- Linguists recognize the Tajik language as a subspecies of Persian and call it Tajik Farsi.
- The total number of those who speak the state language of Tajikistan reaches 8 million people.
- Up to 80% of the country's population consider Tajik to be native, while the rest speak at home in Russian, Uzbek and several others.
- Russian was and remains the language of interethnic communication in accordance with Article 2 of the Basic Law of the country. Several dozen schools have been opened in Tajikistan, where teaching is conducted in Russian, and in the capital, a theater continues to operate, in whose repertoire there are plays in Russian.
- Uzbek considers almost a million of the inhabitants of Tajikistan - ethnic Uzbeks - to be their native language.
Farsi in Tajik
The Tajik version of the Persian is widespread throughout Tajikistan, in some regions of Uzbekistan and even in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. It is very close to Dari, the literary language of the Tajiks of Afghanistan, and therefore the inhabitants of this country are able to understand their neighbors from the former Soviet republic and vice versa.
In 1939, a literary reform took place and, in the Soviet way, Tajik was translated into Cyrillic. Borrowings from Russian also had a great influence on the state language of Tajikistan. At the end of the twentieth century, the Tajik intelligentsia launched a campaign to renew cultural ties with Persian-speaking countries and to cleanse Tajik of Russianisms and other borrowings.
Rights and obligations
The main law of the country prescribes the citizens of the republic to know the state language of Tajikistan and guarantees its application, protection and development. According to the Constitution, all government bodies are obliged to create favorable conditions for the citizens of the country to study Tajik. The law proclaims October 5 as the Day of the State Language.
Tourist notes
Knowledge of Russian is quite enough to travel around Tajikistan. In the republic, the vast majority of its inhabitants speak Russian and a lot has been translated into Russian, including useful tourist information, signs, maps and menus in public catering.
