Tajik people
Tajik is one of the two official languages of Tajikistan, the other being Russian&lt;ref name="lenta.ru/news/2011/06/09"&gt;&lt;/ref&gt; as the official interethnic language. In Afghanistan (where the Tajik people minority forms the principal part of the wider Persophone population), this language is less influenced by Turkic languages, is regarded as a form of Dari and as such has co-official language status. The Tajik of Tajikistan has diverged from Persian as spoken in Afghanistan and Iran due to political borders, geographical isolation, the standardisation process and the influence of Russian and neighbouring Turkic languages. The standard language is based on the northwestern dialects of Tajik (region of the old major city of Samarqand), which have been somewhat influenced by the neighbouring Uzbek language as a result of geographical proximity. Tajik also retains numerous archaic elements in its vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar that have been lost elsewhere in the Persophone world, in part due to its relative isolation in the mountains of Central Asia.