The Sarikoli Alphabet

The Sarikoli alphabet has 32 letters, all derived from the Perso-Arabic script. The 32 letters include the 28 Arabic letters plus 4 letters unique to Persian and Dari: پ (pe, /p/), چ (che, /tʃ/), ژ (zhe, /ʒ/), and گ (gaf, /ɡ/). Short vowels are generally not written but can be indicated with optional diacritical marks called harakat in educational materials.

Sarikoli is spoken in the Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County (塔什库尔干塔吉克自治县) in the Kashgar Prefecture of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. With an estimated 20,000–25,000 speakers, it is the only member of the Pamiri language family spoken within China. Its speakers are officially recognised by the Chinese government as the Tajik ethnic minority (塔吉克族), though linguistically Sarikoli belongs to the Eastern Iranian Pamiri branch rather than the Western Iranian Tajik language.

Sarikoli and Shughni are the closest relatives within the Eastern Iranian Pamiri language family. Both belong to the Shughni-Rushani group, which also includes Rushani, Bartangi, Oroshori, and Yazghulami. Sarikoli is sometimes described as a variety of Shughni or as a sister language. Despite the close relationship, the two communities are separated by significant political and geographic boundaries — Shughni is spoken in Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan, while Sarikoli is spoken in Tashkurgan, China.

Sarikoli is considered vulnerable by language endangerment classifications. With approximately 20,000–25,000 speakers concentrated in a single county in Xinjiang, China, Sarikoli faces pressure from Mandarin Chinese in the educational system and public life, as well as from Persian/Dari in the religious and literary tradition. The geographic isolation of the Tashkurgan community from other Pamiri-speaking populations in Tajikistan and Afghanistan further complicates language maintenance and documentation efforts.

Yes. Like all Perso-Arabic scripts, Sarikoli is written and read from right to left. Each letter connects to adjacent letters within a word in cursive style, and most letters change shape depending on their position — initial, medial, final, or isolated form. The only exception is numerals, which are written left to right even within otherwise RTL Sarikoli text. The script falls within the Arabic Unicode Block (U+0600–U+06FF).

Sarikoli belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Iranian language family, specifically the Shughni-Rushani group of the Pamiri languages. This places it within the larger Indo-Iranian sub-family of Indo-European. The Pamiri languages are distinct from Tajik (a Western Iranian language of the Persian dialect continuum) and from Pashto (a separate Eastern Iranian language). Sarikoli shares the core grammatical and phonological features of the Pamiri group, including ergativity in the verbal system and distinctive vowel contrasts inherited from Old Iranian.