Yaghnobi
Sign in to saveAlso known as Yagnobi, yai, Yaghnobi language, yaqhnobi zivok, sughdi zivok
East Iranian language spoken in the upper valley of the Yaghnob River in the Zarafshan area of Tajikistan by the Tajik-Yaghnobi people
Key facts
- Native to
- Tajikistan
- Region
- originally from Yaghnob Valley , in 1970s relocated to Zafarobod , in 1990s some speakers returned to Yaghnob
- Ethnicity
- Yaghnobi people
- Native speakers
- 12,000 (2004)
- Language family
- Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Northeastern Sogdo-Bactrian Sogdic Yaghnobi
- Early form
- Sogdian
- Dialects
- Eastern Yaghnobi Western Yaghnobi
- Writing system
- Cyrillic script , Latin script , Perso-Arabic script
- Recognised minority language in
- Tajikistan
- Iso 639 3
- yai
- Glottolog
- yagn1238
- Elp
- Yaghnobi
- Linguasphere
- 58-ABC-a
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
Show 6 more facts
- Wikimedia language code
- yai
- number of speakers, writers, or signers
- 12000
- short name
- ягнобский
- native label
- yaɣnobī zīvok
- Wikimedia Incubator URL
- incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/yai
via Wikidata · CC0
~15 min read
Article
Yaghnobi is an Eastern Iranian language spoken in the upper valley of the Yaghnob River in the Zarafshan area of Tajikistan by the Yaghnobi people. It is considered to be a direct descendant of Sogdian or closely related to it and has sometimes been called Neo-Sogdian in academic literature. There are some 12,500 Yaghnobi speakers, divided into several communities. The principal group lives in the Zafarobod area. There are also resettlers in the Yaghnob Valley. Some communities live in the villages of Zumand and Kůkteppa and in Dushanbe or its vicinity.
Most Yaghnobi speakers are bilingual in Tajik, a dialect of Persian. Yaghnobi is mostly used for daily family communication, and Tajik is used by Yaghnobi-speakers for business and formal transactions. A Russian ethnographer was told by nearby Tajiks, long hostile to the Yaghnobis, who were late to adopt Islam, that the Yaghnobis used their language as a "secret" mode of communication to confuse the Tajiks. The account led to the assumption by some that Yaghnobi or some derivative of it was used as a secret code.