The Yaghnobi

The Yaghnobi, who have inhabited the high mountain valley of Yaghnob in west-central Tajikistan for centuries, have been identified as descendants of the ancient Sogdians. The kingdom of Sogdiana existed from before the sixth century BCE until the Arab conquests of the eighth century CE. The Sogdian territory occupied what is now northern Tajikistan and southern Uzbekistan (Raspopova and Shishkina, 1999). From the fifth to the eighth centuries, the Sogdians were the main caravan merchants of  the Silk Road which passed through the Sogdian cities of Samarqand (their capital) and Bukhara (Vaissiere, 2004). The Sogdians also established extensive colonies in what is now western China. Their influence was so extensive that Sogdian, an east-Iranian language, was the lingua franca of Central Asia during the seventh century (Dien). The region to the south of Sogdiana, Ustashana (also called Sorushna) was also populated by Sogdian speaking people (Negmatov, 1999). Its capital, Bunjikat, was near present day Istravshan in northwest Tajikistan (Bosworth, 2005). The dialect of Sogdian spoken in Ustrashana in the eighth century has been identified through lexical and phonological similarities as the language from which modern Yaghnobi has descended. (more…)

Soviet scholars made several expeditions to the Yaghnob valley to document and learn the language. One of the results of their work was a book published in 1957 and was called Yaghnobi texts - Ягнобские тексты. There were published 45 fairy-tales and fokl-stories from different villages of the Yaghnob valley (more…)

The Splashcast below is an audio recording of Saifiddin Mirzoev reading a traditional Yaghnogi folk story.  Saifiddin transcribed this story in 1990 in Zafarabad. The storyteller was Muhmadrasul who was originally from the village of Sokan in the Yaghnob valley. (more…)

The Yaghnobi language is classified as endangered in the UNESCO Red Book of endangered languages. However, an SIL team who conducted a survey of the Yaghnobi language during 2003 and 2004 (Paul, et. al. 2005) concluded that the ethnolinguistic vitality of the Yaghnobi language is strong. Why the differing assessments?

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