Tajik alphabet

As with many post-Soviet states, the change in writing system and the debates surrounding it is closely intertwined with political themes. Although not having been used since the adoption of Cyrillic, the Latin script is supported by those who wish to bring the country closer to Uzbekistan, which has adopted the Latin-based Uzbek alphabet. The Persian alphabet is supported by the devoutly religious, Islamists, and by those who wish to bring the country closer to Iran, Afghanistan, and their Persian heritage. As the de facto standard, the Cyrillic alphabet is generally supported by those who wish to maintain the status quo, and not distance the country from Russia. ==History==

As a result of the influence of Islam in the region, Tajik was written in the Persian alphabet up to the 1920s. Until this time, the language was not thought of as separate and simply considered a dialect of the Persian language. The Soviets began by simplifying the Persian alphabet in 1923, before moving to a Latin-based system in 1927. The Latin script was introduced by the Soviet Union as part of an effort to increase literacy and distance the, at that time, largely illiterate population, from the Islamic Central Asia. There were also practical considerations. The regular Persian alphabet, being an abjad, does not provide sufficient letters for representing the vowel system of Tajik. In addition, the abjad is more difficult to learn, each letter having different forms depending on the position in the word. The Decree on Romanisation made this law in April 1928. The Latin variant for Tajik was based on the work by Turcophone scholars who aimed to produce a unified Turkic alphabet, despite Tajik not being a Turkic language. The literacy campaign was successful, with near-universal literacy being achieved by the 1950s. During the russification processes in Central Asia, the Cyrillic script was introduced in the late 1930s.{{Cite book The Persian alphabet was introduced into education and public life, although the banning of the Islamic Renaissance Party in 1993 slowed down the adoption. In 1999, the word Farsi was removed from the state-language law. the de facto standard in use was the Cyrillic alphabet and , only a very small part of the population could read the Persian alphabet. ==Variants==

The letters of the major versions of the Tajik alphabet are presented below, along with their phonetic values. There is also a comparative table below. Persian alphabet The Persian alphabet (an abjad) is a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet used to write Tajik in Afghanistan and was formerly used in Tajikistan prior to Soviet rule. Letters , , , and are additional letters used for sounds (i.e., ) not found in Arabic. The letters , , , , , , and are used solely in words of Arabic origin. Like the majority of Arabic-based orthographies, short vowels (e.g., ) are optionally written as vowel diacritics, and are generally not used in writing. Latin alphabet The Latin script was introduced after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in order to facilitate an increase in literacy and distance the language from Islamic influence. Only lowercase letters were found in the first versions of the Latin variant, between 1926 and 1929. A slightly different variant used by Bukharan Jews speaking a traditional dialect of Judeo-Persian included three extra characters for phonemes not found in other dialects: , and The character is called Gha and represents the phoneme . The character is found in Yañalif in which most non-Slavic languages of the Soviet Union were written until the late 1930s. The Latin alphabet is not widely used today, although its adoption is advocated by certain groups. Additionally, since 1940, when Jewish schools were closed in Central Asia, the use of the Hebrew Alphabet outside Hebrew liturgy fell into disuse and Bukharian Jewish publications such as books and newspapers began to appear using the Tajik Cyrillic Alphabet. Today, many older Bukharian Jews who speak Bukharian and went to Tajik or Russian schools in Central Asia only know the Tajik Cyrillic Alphabet when reading and writing Bukharian and Tajik. } || || || || || || || || || || || Transliteration standards The transliteration standards for the Tajik alphabet in Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet are as follows: Notes to the table above: • ISO 9 — The International Organization for Standardization ISO 9 specification. • KNAB — From the placenames database of the Institute of the Estonian Language. • WWS — From ''World's Writing Systems'', Bernard Comrie (ed.) • ALA-LC — The standard of the Library of Congress and the American Library Association. • Edward Allworth, ed. Nationalities of the Soviet East. Publications and Writing Systems (NY: Columbia University Press, 1971) • BGN/PCGN — The standard of the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use. • KSNG – The standard of the Commission on Standardization of Geographical Names Outside the Republic of Poland (Komisja Standaryzacji Nazw Geograficznych poza Granicami Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej) ==Sample texts==

in northern Tajikistan, inviting citizens to vote in the local labor councils elections on 29 December 1939. The text reads: . A table comparing the different writing systems used for the Tajik alphabet. The Latin here is based on the 1929 standard, the Cyrillic on the revised 1998 standard, and Persian letters are given in their stand-alone forms. ==See also==