page_title: Yaghnobi language
section_title: Sample texts
hierarchical_section_title: Yaghnobi language / Sample texts
caption_attribution_description: English: Yaghnobi People
context_page_description: Yaghnobi is an Eastern Iranian language spoken in the upper valley of the Yaghnob River in the Zarafshan area of Tajikistan by the Yaghnobi people. It is considered to be a direct descendant of Sogdian and has often been called Neo-Sogdian in academic literature. There are some 12,500 Yaghnobi speakers, divided into several communities. The principal group lives in the Zafarobod area. There are also resettlers in the Yaghnob Valley. Some communities live in the villages of Zumand and Kůkteppa and in Dushanbe or its vicinity.
  Most Yaghnobi speakers are bilingual in Tajik. Yaghnobi is mostly used for daily family communication, and Tajik is used by Yaghnobi-speakers for business and formal transactions. A single Russian ethnographer was told by nearby Tajiks, long hostile to the Yaghnobis, who were late to adopt Islam, that the Yaghnobis used their language as a "secret" mode of communication to confuse the Tajiks. The account led to the belief by some, especially those reliant solely on Russian sources, that Yaghnobi or some derivative of it was used as a code for nefarious purposes.
  There are two main dialects: a western and an eastern one. They differ primarily in phonetics.
caption: A group of Yaghnobi-speaking schoolchildren from Tajikistan
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