Tajiks

Tajiks (Persian: تاجیکان, Tajik: Тоҷикон), also spelled Tadzhiks or Tadjiks, are a group of various Persianate Eastern Iranian peoples native to Central Asia, living predominantly in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Although the term Tajik does not refer to a cohesive transnational ethnic group, Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan and the second-largest in both Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. They speak varieties of Persian, a West Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, the small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups have been included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to the Pamiri ethnic groups of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are considered a separate ethnic group. As a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik, which originally had some pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians, has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Fārsīwān (Persian-speaker) and Dīhgān (cf. Tajik: Деҳқон), which translates to 'farmer or settled villager'; in a wider sense, it means 'settled' in contrast to 'nomadic', and was later used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as 'Persian of noble blood' in contrast to Arabs, Turks, and Romans during the Sasanian and early Islamic periods. Historically, the term Tajik was used synonymously and interchangeably with Persian. The Tajiks are of mixed origin and are primarily descendants of Bactrians, Sogdians, and Scythians, but also of Persians, Greeks, and various Turkic peoples of Central Asia, all of whom are known to have inhabited the region at various times. Tajiks are therefore mainly Eastern Iranian in their ethnic makeup but speak a Persian dialect, which is a Western Iranian language; they likely adopted the language in the...