Tajiks

Tajiks
Тоҷикон
تاجيکان

Tajiks
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[a]
Kazakhstan	50,121[12]
China	39,642[13]
Ukraine	4,255[14]
Languages
Persian (Dari and Tajik) Secondary: Pashto, Russian, Uzbek
Religion
Predominantly Sunni Islam[15] minority Shia Islam[16]
Related ethnic groups
Other Iranian peoples

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]

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]

The Tajiks have a mixed origin, and are primarily descended from Bactrians, Sogdians, Scythians, but also Persians, Greeks, Arabs and various Turkic peoples of Central Asia,^[25][26] all of whom are known to have inhabited the region at various times. Tajiks are therefore mainly Eastern Iranian in their ethnic makeup but speak a Persian dialect, which is a Western Iranian language, likely adopting the language in the 7th century AD following the Islamic conquest of Persia, when the prestigious Persian language consequently spread further east leading to the gradual extinction of the Bactrian and Sogdian languages.^[27][28] The Tajiks and their ancestors have inhabited Northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Central Asia continuously for many millennia.^[29] Northern Afghanistan in particular was significantly Tajik in ethnic makeup for most of its history, and only recently inhabited by other groups like the Pashtuns as a result of the Pashtun colonization of northern Afghanistan in the 19th century. The culture of the Tajiks is predominantly Persianate but with strong elements from other cultures of Central Asia, such as Turkic and heavily infused with Islamic traditions.

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