Up to and including the nineteenth century, speakers in Afghanistan and Central Asia had no separate name for the language and simply regarded themselves as speaking Farsi, which is the endonym for the Persian language. The

The most important cities of Central Asia—Samarkand and Bukhara—are in present-day Uzbekistan, where ethnic Tajiks comprise a majority.

The word order of Tajiki Persian is subject–object–verb. Tajik Persian grammar is similar to the classical Persian grammar (and the grammar of modern varieties such as Iranian Persian). The most notable difference between classical Persian grammar and

In Tajikistan and other countries of the former Soviet Union, Tajik Persian is currently written in Cyrillic script, although it was written in the Latin script beginning in 1928 and the

Vowels
The table below lists the six vowel phonemes in standard, literary Tajik. Letters from the Tajik

Tajik is conservative in its vocabulary, retaining numerous terms that have long since fallen into disuse in Iran and Afghanistan, such as арзиз (arziz), meaning "tin" and фарбеҳ (farbeh), meaning "fat". Most modern loan words in Tajik come from

According to many scholars, the New Persian language (which subsequently evolved into the Persian forms spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and