The Tajik Alphabet

The Tajik Cyrillic alphabet has 35 letters — 9 vowels and 26 consonants. The alphabet includes 6 letters unique to Tajik that are absent from Russian Cyrillic: Ғ ғ (voiced velar/uvular fricative /ɣ/), Ӣ ӣ (long vowel /iː/), Қ қ (voiceless uvular stop /q/), Ӯ ӯ (long vowel /uː/), Ҳ ҳ (glottal/pharyngeal fricative /h/), and Ҷ ҷ (voiced postalveolar affricate /dʒ/). These unique letters represent sounds from the Persian/Arabic phonological tradition.

Tajik is spoken primarily in Tajikistan, where it is the official language, by an estimated 8–9 million speakers worldwide. It is also spoken in significant communities in Uzbekistan (especially in Samarkand and Bukhara), Afghanistan (where the same language is called Dari), Russia, and other countries with Tajik diaspora communities. Tajikistan was part of the Soviet Union until 1991; Dushanbe is the national capital and main centre of Tajik-language culture.

Tajik is a variety of Persian, mutually intelligible with standard Persian (Farsi) and Dari (the Persian of Afghanistan). All three are dialects of the same language with a shared classical literary tradition. Tajik preserves some archaic Eastern Iranian features, including Classical Persian vowel quantity distinctions (long /iː/ and /uː/ written as Ӣ and Ӯ), which have been lost in modern standard Persian. The most visible difference is that Tajik is written in the Cyrillic script rather than the Perso-Arabic script used by Farsi and Dari.

Tajik uses the Cyrillic script because of its history as a Soviet republic. The language underwent three script changes in the 20th century: it used the Perso-Arabic script before 1928, then a Latin-based script from 1928 to 1940, and finally the Cyrillic script from 1940 onwards. The shift to Cyrillic was part of Soviet policy to standardise scripts across Soviet nationalities and to distance them from the shared Persian literary and cultural tradition. Since Tajikistan's independence in 1991, there have been discussions about returning to the Latin or Perso-Arabic scripts, but Cyrillic remains the official standard today.

Tajik is written left to right, the same as Russian and other Cyrillic-script languages. This contrasts with Persian (Farsi) and Dari, which use the Perso-Arabic script and are written right to left. The left-to-right direction of the Tajik Cyrillic script was established when the Soviet Union adopted Cyrillic for Tajik in 1940. Tajik therefore reads in the opposite direction to its linguistically related sister dialects, Farsi and Dari.

The six letters unique to Tajik Cyrillic — not found in Russian or standard Cyrillic — are: Ғ ғ (voiced velar/uvular fricative /ɣ/, corresponding to Arabic غ ghain), Ӣ ӣ (long close front vowel /iː/, inherited from Classical Persian vowel quantity), Қ қ (voiceless uvular stop /q/, corresponding to Arabic ق qaf), Ӯ ӯ (long close back rounded vowel /uː/, inherited from Classical Persian vowel quantity), Ҳ ҳ (voiceless glottal/pharyngeal fricative /h/, corresponding to Arabic ح and ه), and Ҷ ҷ (voiced postalveolar affricate /dʒ/, corresponding to Arabic ج jim). These six letters represent the sounds of Tajik's Persian and Arabic phonological heritage that could not be represented by standard Russian Cyrillic letters.