Tajik Language Guide

Where it's spoken

Under Article 2 of Tajikistan's constitution, Tajik is the state language, and Russian is the language of communication between the nationalities. Tajik is closely related to Dari and to Persian, and the spoken forms of Tajik and of the Persian of Iran are described as mutually intelligible to educated speakers of both. A variety called Bukharan Tajik is spoken in Bukhara, in Uzbekistan; in Bukhara, the language of administration, officialdom, education and publication is now firmly Uzbek.

Sources

• Constitution of the Republic of Tajikistan (1994, rev. 2016), English translation by Patricie H. Ward; 2016 amendments translated by UN Women (Constitute Project) — Art. 2 (state language; Russian as language of interethnic communication)
• Ido, Shinji (2014). "Bukharan Tajik." Journal of the International Phonetic Association 44(1), Illustrations of the IPA — p.87–89 (Bukharan Tajik; language of administration in Bukhara)
• Davis, Chris Irwin (2012). "Tajik-Farsi Persian Transliteration Using Statistical Machine Translation." Proceedings of LREC 2012 — Abstract (mutual intelligibility of spoken Tajik and Farsi)

Script & pronunciation

Tajik is written in a Cyrillic alphabet with six letters that the Russian alphabet does not have: ғ, ӣ, қ, ӯ, ҳ and ҷ. In the first half of the twentieth century, Tajik went from a variant of the Arabic script, like Persian, to a modified Latin script that was used for ten years, and then to Cyrillic. An orthographic reform decreed by the government of Tajikistan in the late twentieth century abolished the letters ц, щ, ь and ы.

This app's romanization splits words into syllables with hyphens, as in Man na-me-fah-mam ("I don't understand"). As in the BGN/PCGN romanization table, the cards write х as kh, ҳ as h and ҷ as j, as in Ҳоҷатхона куҷост? (Ho-jat-kho-na ku-jost?, "Where is the toilet/bathroom?"). In Маъзарат мехоҳам (Maʼ-za-rat me-kho-ham, "Sorry") the letter ъ is written with an apostrophe; the BGN/PCGN table also romanizes ъ with an apostrophe.

Sources

• BGN/PCGN (2022). Romanization of Tajik: BGN/PCGN 1994 System — Introduction (six extra letters); romanization table (х, ҳ, ҷ, ъ)
• Gacek, Tomasz (2014). "De-russianisation of Internationalisms in the Tajik Language." Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 131: 149–160 — p.150 fn.1 (Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic); p.154 (1998 removal of ц, щ, ы, ь)