Tajiks - Orientation

Identification. Tajiks are a Central Asian people who live in Afghanistan, in republics of the former Soviet Union, and in China. Within the former Soviet Union, they are concentrated in the Republic of Tajikistan, although important populations also live in Uzbekistan. Tojikistoni shuravi (Soviet Tadzhikistan), a sovereign republic, was formed in 1929. The distinguishing features of Tajiks are their language, sedentary life-style, and Islamic-Iranian culture. The widespread use of "Tajik" as an ethnopolitical term emerged with Soviet usage; prior to that, regional rather than linguistic affiliation held the key to self-identity. In Soviet usage, the term "Tajik" also includes speakers of non-Persian Iranian languages who inhabit mountain valleys in the Pamir mountain area such as Sarikolis, Wakhis, and Shugnis.

Location. Tajik-inhabited areas fall roughly between 65° and 75° W and 35° to 42° N. Tajikistan is the southeasternmost of the republics of the former Soviet Union and is bordered by Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the west and north, the Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China to the east, and Afghanistan to the south. The total area of Tajikistan is 143,100 square kilometers. The entire Tajik-inhabited region is very mountainous with narrow valleys; agriculture is nourished by mineral silt and irrigation waters from fast-flowing rivers fed by melting snows. The rivers form tributaries of the Panj, which flows into the Amu Darya (Oxus River). Northern Tajikistan includes parts of the Ferghana Valley, where the waters eventually meet to flow into the Syr Darya (Jaxartes River).

Geographically, the Tajik Republic is trifurcated by mountains that are impassable by road in winter. The northern portion is dominated by the town of Khojent, formerly Leninabad; the capital, Dushanbe, known from 1930 to 1931 as Stalinabad, is in the south. To the east, but still part of the Tajik Republic, is the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, a sparsely populated area inhabited mainly by small, valley ethnic groups including Kyrgyz. The major urban center of this area has become Khorog.

The climate falls within the temporal continental high-altitude range with about 320 days of sunlight. Precipitation occurs as rain and snow, mainly between November and April. Summers are hot and dry with mean daytime temperature in July ranging from 23 to 30° C.

Demography. The world Tajik population is more difficult to analyze than that within the republics of the former Soviet Union, although this too has been subject to manipulation, especially outside Tajikstan. The 1989 census placed the number of Tajiks within the Soviet Union at 4,217,000, 3,168,000 of these residing within their own republic and 932,000 in Uzbekistan; in other words, about 99 percent of the Tajiks reside in these two republics. Together with the estimated 4 million Dari speakers in Afghanistan, who may also be identified broadly as Tajik, and smaller numbers in the People's Republic of China, the world Tajik population may be estimated at about 9 million. Since the 1959 Soviet census, Tajiks have increased in number by 201.9 percent, making them the fastest-growing major ethnic group of the former Soviet Union. They constitute 62.25 percent of the population of Tajikistan and 4.7 percent of that of Uzbekistan (Uzbeks constitute 23.52 percent of that of Tajikistan). The number of Russians in Tajikistan is declining (7 percent in 1989).

Linguistic Affiliation. The standard Tajik dialect is mutually intelligible with the Persian of Iran and the Dari of Afghanistan and is increasingly being called either Farsi-Tojiki or Farsi (Persian), all of which form the major living branch of the Iranian Language Family. In addition to standard Tajik, nineteen dialects exist, which differ from each other morphologically and phonetically. Rural mountain valley people cannot be readily understood by urban Tajiks, who generally use the standard dialect. Tajik intellectuals are monolingual (Russian), bilingual (Tajik and Russian), or trilingual (Tajik, Russian, and Uzbek). The Tajiks, on the whole, are one of the least Russified Muslim communities of the former Soviet Union; in 1979, only 22,666 claimed Russian as their "first native language."