Tajik people
Tajik or Tajiki (Tajik: , , ), also called Tajiki Persian (Tajik: , , ) and Tadzhiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by Tajik people. It is closely related to neighbouring Dari with which it forms a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Persian language. Since the beginning of the twentieth century and independence of Tajikistan from the Soviet Union, Tajik has been considered by a number of writers and researchers to be a variety of Persian. The popularity of this conception of Tajik as a variety of Persian was such that, during the period in which Tajik intellectuals were trying to establish Tajik as a language separate from Persian, Sadriddin Ayni, who was a prominent intellectual and educator, made a statement that Tajik was not a "bastardised dialect" of Persian. The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political sides to it (see Perry 1996).