Tajiks

Tajik (Dari: تاجيک: Tājīk , Tajik: Тоҷик) is a general designation for a wide range of Persian-speaking people of Iranian origin, with traditional homelands in present-day Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.

As a self-designation, the term Tajik, which earlier on had been more or less pejorative, has become acceptable only during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Fārsī (Persian), Fārsīwān (Persian-speaker), and Dīhgān (cf. Tajik: Деҳқон, Dehqon, literally "farmer or settled villager", in a wider sense "settled" in contrast to "nomadic" and also described as a class of land-owning magnates during the Sassanid and early Islamic period).

Not all Tajiks speak a variety of modern Persian. They may speak any one of the extant Iranian languages. For example, the Tajiks of China are actually Pamiris and speak the Eastern Iranic Pamiri languages and are distinct from more western Tajiks.

History

Persian people

The Persian people (Persian: پارسیان) are an Iranian people who speak the modern Persian language and closely related Iranian dialects and languages.

The term Persian translates to "from Persis" which is a region north of the Persian Gulf located in Pars, Iran. It was from this region that Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid empire, united all other Iranian empires (such as the Medes), and expanded the Persian cultural and social influences by incorporating the Babylonian empire, and the Lydian empire. Although not the first Iranian empire, the Achaemenid empire is the first Persian empire well recognized by Greek and Persian historians for its massive cultural, military and social influences going as far as Athens, Macedonia, Egypt, and Libya.

Persians have generally been a pan-national group often comprising regional people who often refer to themselves as "Persians" and have also often used the term "Iranian" (in the ethnic-cultural sense). Some scholars, mechanically identifying the speakers of Persian as a distinct ethnic unit (the ‘Persians’), exclude those Iranians who speak dialects of Persian. However, this approach can be misleading, as historically all ethnic groups in Iran were collectively referred to as Iranians or Persians until 1935, when Rezā Shāh formally required foreign countries to call Persia by its native name, Iran.

Tajiks (disambiguation)

Tajiks may refers to: