the language of the Tadzhiks. It is spoken in the Tadzhik SSR, in many parts of the Uzbek SSR, in some parts of the Kirghiz SSR and Kazakh SSR, and in northern Afghanistan. There are about 2 million speakers of Tadzhik in the USSR (1970 census).
Tadzhik belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian languages and has four major groups of dialects. These are the northern group, which includes the dialects of Samarkand and Bukhara (the basis of the modern Tadzhik literary language) and the dialects of the Fergana Valley, Ura-Tiube, and Pendzhikent; the central, or Upper Zeravshan, group; the southern group, which includes the Kuliab-Karateginskii and Badakhshan dialects; and the southeastern, or Darvaza, group.
Tadzhik has six vowel phonemes and 24 consonant phonemes. It is an inflectional and analytic language. The nouns have lost their former well-developed declensional system, and there are no genders or cases. Case relationships are expressed syntactically. The postpositional attributive group is a common means of linking nouns. The well-developed verb system has many analytic forms. There are four moods: the indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and suppositional subjunctive. Tadzhik has a complex system of aspects and temporal forms and of verbal compounds with varying aspectual meanings and nuances. The vocabulary of Tadzhik includes borrowings from Arabic, Uzbek, and Russian, as well as Tadzhik roots and roots that are common to all Iranian languages.
The first works written in Tadzhik date from the ninth century. Tadzhik is based on the Arabic alphabet. In the USSR it was written in the Latin alphabet beginning in 1930; since 1940 it has been written in Cyrillic.
A. A. KERIMOVA