Tajikistan
Languages

The official languages of Tajikistan are Tajik as the state language and Russian as the interethnic language, as understood in Article 2 of the Constitution: "The state language of Tajikistan shall be Tajik. Russian shall be the language of international communication."

The state (national) language (Tajik: забони давлатӣ, romanized: zaboni davlatí, Russian: государственный язык, romanized: gosudarstvennyy yazyk) of the Republic of Tajikistan is Tajik, which is written in the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet. Linguists recognise the fact that the Tajik language is a variant of the Persian language (or Farsi). Therefore, Tajik speakers have no problems communicating with Persian speakers from Iran and Dari speakers from Afghanistan. Millions of native Tajik speakers live in neighboring Uzbekistan and in Russia.

According to article 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of Tajikistan, Russian is recognized as the second official language of Tajikistan; the official language of inter-ethnic communication (Russian: язык межнационального общения; Tajik: забони муоширати байни миллатҳо) in the country.

Approximately 90% of the population of Tajikistan speaks Russian at levels. The varieties of Russian spoken in Tajikistan are referred to by scholars as Tajik(istani) Russian and it shares some similarities with Uzbek(istani) Russian, such as morphological differences and the lexical differences like the use of words урюк for a wild apricot or кислушка for rhubarb.

Both Russian and Tajik speakers in the country use the following words in common in address to unfamiliar people and acquaintances.

The "highly educated" part of the population of Tajikistan, and the intelligentsia, prefer to speak Russian and Persian, the pronunciation of which in Tajikistan is called the "Iranian style".

Native Uzbek speakers live in the north and west of Tajikistan. In fourth place (after Tajik, Russian and Uzbek) by number of native speakers are Pamir languages, whose native speakers live in Kuhistani Badakshshan Autonomous Region. The majority of Zoroastrians in Tajikistan speak 1 of the Pamir languages. Native speakers of the Kyrgyz language live in the north of Kuhistani Badakshshan Autonomous Region. Yagnobi language speakers live in the west of the country. The Parya language of local Romani people (Central Asian Gypsies) is spoken in Tajikistan. Tajikistan has communities of native speakers of Persian, Arabic, Pashto, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Tatar, Turkmen, Kazakh, Chinese, Ukrainian.
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