12 Facts About Tajiks

Tajiks are a Persian-speaking 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.

Tajiks are an Iranian people, speaking a variety of Persian, concentrated in the Oxus Basin, the Fargana valley and on both banks of the upper Oxus, i e, the Pamir Mountains and northeastern Afghanistan .

Contemporary Tajiks are the descendants of ancient Eastern Iranian inhabitants of Central Asia, in particular, the Sogdians and the Bactrians, and possibly other groups, with an admixture of Western Iranian Persians and non-Iranian peoples.

Tajiks are the direct descendants of the Iranian peoples whose continuous presence in Central Asia and northern Afghanistan is attested from the middle of the 1st millennium BC.

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The ancestors of the Tajiks constituted the core of the ancient population of Khwarezm and Bactria, which formed part of Transoxania .

Tajiks are the principal ethnic group in most of Tajikistan, as well as in northern and western Afghanistan, though there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan.

Tajiks are a substantial minority in Uzbekistan, as well as in overseas communities.

In Uzbekistan, the Tajiks are the largest part of the population of the ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, and are found in large numbers in the Surxondaryo Region in the south and along Uzbekistan's eastern border with Tajikistan.

The authors concluded that Tajiks stayed largely unaffected by outside geneflow, and show continuity with ancient samples since the Iron Age.

Language of the Tajiks is an eastern dialect of Persian, called Dari, or Parsi-e Darbari.

Today the great majority of Tajiks follow Sunni Islam, although small Twelver and Ismaili Shia minorities exist in scattered pockets.