Tajik language

Tajik (autoglottonymous AFI: [tɔːdʒɪˈkiː]) is an Iranian language of the same branch as Persian. Both Tajik and Persian have a high degree of mutual understanding. Tajik is spoken by more than four million people and is the official language of Tajikistan, although it is also spoken in neighboring countries.

Before 1928, the language was written with characters from the Persian alphabet, although it later adopted the Latin alphabet, between 1928 and 1940, before moving on to a version of the Cyrillic alphabet. In 1994, the Tajik government attempted to reintroduce the Latin alphabet as a writing system.

Phonology

Vowels

The table below shows the vowels in standard literary Tajik. Dialects often have more vowels.

1. The posterior open vowel has been described as [o] (actually half-anterior), [, []]and []]

Grammar

Word order in Tajik Persian is subject-object-verb. The grammar of Tajik Persian is almost identical to the grammar of Classical Persian (and to the grammar of other modern varieties such as Iranian Persian), although there are important differences.

Nouns

Nouns do not have a marker for grammatical gender, although they do have a marker for number. Gender is normally distinguished lexically, as in English. For example: мурғ (murj) 'chicken' and хурус (hurus) 'rooster'. The modifiers 'nar' (nar) for the masculine and 'modа' (fashion) for the feminine, both before and after the noun: хари нар (xari nar) 'donkey' and хари мода (xari moda) 'donkey'.

Vocabulary