Tajiks
Iranian ethnic group native to Central Asia / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Tajiks (Persian: تاجيک، تاجک, romanized: Tājīk, Tājek; Tajik: Тоҷик, romanized: Tojik) are a Persian-speaking[17] Iranian ethnic group native to Central Asia, living primarily in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, and the second-largest in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. They speak varieties of Persian, a Western Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks.[18] In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages.[19][20] In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are counted as a separate ethnic group.[21]
Total population | |
---|---|
c. 19–26 million | |
Regions with significant populations | |
Afghanistan | 8-15 million (2024)[1] [2] |
Tajikistan | ~8,700,000 (2024)[3] [4] |
Uzbekistan | ~1,700,000 (2021)[5] other, non-official, scholarly estimates are 8-12 million[6][7][8] |
Russia | ~400,000[9] |
Kyrgyzstan | 58,913[10] |
United States | 52,000[lower-alpha 1] |
Kazakhstan | 50,121[12] |
China | 39,642[13] |
Ukraine | 4,255[14] |
Languages | |
Persian (Dari and Tajik) Secondary: Pashto, Russian, Uzbek | |
Religion | |
Vast majority Sunni Islam[15] minority Shia Islam, Sufism, and others[16] | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Other Iranian peoples |
As a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik, which originally had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians,[22][23] has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia.[17] 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 "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 Sassanid and early Islamic period.[24][22]