*Languages: Tajik (Tajikistan), Uzbek (Uzbekistan)
* Rayyan is from Pembroke Pines, FL and is a high school senior at the American Heritage School.
He is a NSLI-Y Tajikistan (Persian) Summer 2018 Alumnus, as well as the 2019 Southeast Region Alumni Representative for the NSLI-Y Alumni Association. This piece is part of the NSLI-Y Alumni Insights Virtual Event.
This past summer, I traveled to Tajikistan with the National Security Language Initiative for Youth Program to learn Tajik Persian, the local dialect of Tajikistan. Although my initial interest in learning Persian was to explore the connection between Persian and Hindustani, I became fascinated with the Uzbek influence on Tajik language and culture. This led me down a fascinating path of history and culture of a region that was once a center of learning and commerce along the historic Silk Road.
Tajik Persian belongs to the Southwestern branch of Iranian languages, which itself a branch of the Indo-European language family that includes English, Russian, and Dutch. Generally considered to be a variety of Persian rather than a separate language, Tajik in its standard form is almost indistinguishable from its Iranian and Afghan counterparts. General distinguishing features include the usage of the verb истодан (istodan - to stand) to form the present progressive as well as Russian, Uzbek, and archaic Persian words that other dialects do not employ.
Uzbek, on the other hand, is a Turkic language, part of a language family that extends from Europe all the way to Siberia. Specifically, Uzbek falls under the Karluk branch of Turkic languages, making it a sibling of the Uyghur language spoken in Western China. Some prominent features include its lack of vowel harmony and the rounding of the vowel /ɑ/ to /ɒ/, both features the majority of Turkic languages do not have.
(Left to right, top to bottom): Tajikistan; Mountains near Tajikistan; Dushanbe, Tajikistan; Hisor Fortress; Mountains near Iskanderkul
Turkic and Iranian peoples have been in close contact with each other for centuries, with early contact in the sixth and seventh centuries likely beginning this long-lasting relationship. Over centuries of trade, war, and intermingling, the two languages slowly exerted influence over each other’s grammar and vocabulary as communities interacted with each other. However, only around the beginning of the sixteenth century did the Tajik language began to exhibit features that distinguished itself from the Persian of other areas. In these areas, Tajiks and Uzbeks intermarried and lived amongst each other, creating a unique merger area that still exists to this day. On top of this, for one reason or another, many Tajiks in Uzbekistan identify either solely formally or completely as Uzbek, despite having grown up speaking Tajik in their home. Even within the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, Tajik enclaves within Uzbekistan, many identify themselves primarily as Samarkand or Bukharan rather than Tajik. A similar situation exists in Tajikistan — albeit to a lesser extent — with the Uzbek population. Most, if not all, formally identify as Tajik with the government, even if they informally identify as Uzbek. Due to this intermingling, Uzbek and Tajik inherited huge amounts of vocabulary and grammatical features from one another, resulting in strong similarities both in formal and informal speech.
The most visible example of this intermingling can be seen in both languages’ vocabulary, where many words resemble their counterparts, with the majority retaining the same meaning. Common words such as ko’cha, mehmon, sabzavot, qog’oz (meaning street, guest, vegetable, and paper respectively) are understood in both languages. However, some words, such as хунук (xunuk), have taken on separate meanings. In Tajikistan, it means ‘cold’, but in Uzbekistan, it means ‘ugly’ (which could cause some troubles for an unknowing traveler). Furthermore, previously non-Turkic prepositions such as chunki (because) as well as some prefixes and suffixes have found their way into standard and informal Uzbek. Overall, the standard registers of both languages acknowledge the influence of the other to some extent, but not to the extent that is actually present within the vernacular. In the following example, you can see the similarities and differences between the two languages.
As you can see, informal Tajik demonstrates a greater influence from Uzbek, substantially differentiating it from standard Tajik. The most prominent feature is the words common to both, such as kartoshka, shurbo, and aralash (potatoes, soup, mix). One can see that informal Tajik has adopted aralash but formal Tajik has not, opting to keep omexta as part of the verb to denote to mix. The next feature is the interrogative enclitic utilized in Turkic languages that turns a sentence into a question. At the very end of the sentence, the enclitic -mi suffixes itself onto the sentence, transforming it into a question. This has taken the place of the Persian oyo, which performs a similar task. Also represented is the shared usage of certain prepositions as postpositions. Specifically, the words ба (ba - to), дар (dar - in), and қати (qati - with) can be placed after a word instead of before them. The word kardagi (constructed from the Persian suffix -гӣ -gi and the stem карда karda of the verb ‘to do’) has become used in a range of verb tenses, similar to Uzbek verbs. The most popular of these verb tenses is the present perfect. Instead of the standard Tajik кардаанд karda-and (they have been), one says рафтагӣ-анд ‘raftagi-and.’ Besides this, raftagi can also be used in the past perfect tense as well as a conjectural tense, which has further deepened the divide between Tajik and its Iranian counterpart Farsi.
Ultimately, Uzbek has had a dramatic effect on both standard Persian and the informal Tajik variety, due to the many centuries of contact in Central Asia speakers of both languages have had with each other. Tajik has adopted Uzbek grammatical structures and vocabulary at both the informal and formal registers, and the same can be said for Uzbek. The two have come together to form their own group of languages, making them fascinating — not only in the context of their own language families, but also the world.
Meet the Writer!
The interactions between language and politics as well as the history of linguistic minorities fascinate Rayyan and have led him to study languages such as Tajik, Konkani, Urdu, Spanish, and Portuguese. In college, he plans to pursue a Linguistics Major while hopefully continuing his study of Classical Voice.
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