Yaghnobi language

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.

The language is taught in elementary school within the ethnic community, and Tajikistan has also enacted legislation to support education in minority languages, including Yaghnobi.

There are two main dialects: a western and an eastern one. They differ primarily in phonetics. For example, historical *θ corresponds to t in the western dialects and s in the eastern: met – mes 'day' from Sogdian mēθ ⟨myθ⟩. Western ay corresponds to Eastern e: wayš – weš 'grass' from Sogdian wayš or wēš ⟨wyš⟩. The early Sogdian group θr (later ṣ̌) is reflected as sar in the east but tir in the west: saráy – tiráy 'three' from Sogdian θrē/θray or ṣ̌ē/ṣ̌ay ⟨δry⟩. There are also some differences in verbal endings and the lexicon. In between the two main dialects is a transitional dialect that shares some features of both other dialects.

Yaghnobi was mostly unwritten until recent times, but according to Andreyev, some of the Yaghnobi scholars used the Persian script for writing the language before 1928, mainly when they needed to hide some information from the Tajiks.

Nowadays, the language is largely transcribed by scholars using a modified Latin alphabet, with the following symbols:

In the 1990s, Sayfiddin Mirzozoda of the Tajik Academy of Sciences introduced a modified Tajik alphabet for writing Yaghnobi, in addition to several textbooks intended to for elementary school students. The shared orthography between Tajik and Yaghnobi transliterated according to Mirzozoda’s scheme offered the promise of improved literacy among Tajik-literate Yaghnobi youth, but since 2006 the Tajik government has stopped providing funding for the printing of Yaghnobi textbooks and the hiring of teachers of Yaghnobi, and so these efforts have largely stagnated. Additionally, Mirzozoda's method of transliteration presents a few notable drawbacks in that it does not distinguish between the short and long forms of every vowel, it does not distinguish between [v] and [β], and it has no inherent markings for the indication of stress, as can be seen in Mirzozoda's alphabet, reproduced with its IPA correspondences in this table below.

The Yaghnobi Alphabet was same as Tajik but with Ԝ.