Tajik is a variety of Persian (Farsi) that is spoken in Tajikistan and also in Uzbekistan. It is also related to Dari, a variety of Persian spoken in Afghanistan. These three varieties are all mutually intelligible.
Although Iranian Persian is written with the right-to-left Persian script which is similar to Arabic, since the 1930’s, Tajik has been written with the Cyrillic script (left-to-right) due to the influence of the Soviet Union. In 1939, materials published using the Persian script were banned.
Alongside other Iranian languages, Tajik is member of the Indo-European language group together with other branches such as a Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Aryan to name a few.
