تازی، تازیک یا تاژیک، نامی است که ایرانیان به عرب‌ها دادند. تازی شیوهٔ تلفظ ایرانیان از نام قبیله طایی است که در زبان پارسی میانه و زبان پارتی به کار می‌رفت و هم‌اکنون بنی لام عبدالخان از دودمان این تیره در خوزستان سکونت دارند. گفته می‌شود که قبیله طایی نخستین عرب‌هایی بودند که ایرانیان در دوران پیش از اسلام با ایشان مواجهه داشتند و بعدها این واژه را برای همه عرب‌ها به صورت عمومی بکار بردند. در دوران پس از اسلام و ورود اعراب مسلمان به ماوراءالنهر این لغت تغییر معنا داد و در مقابل قبایل ترک ساکن در ترکستان غربی، به همه مسلمانان آن نواحی فارغ از قومیتشان تازیک یا تاژیک گفتند.TADJIK. (2000). In The Encyclopædia of Islam. "TADJIK, the later form of a word Tazik or Tazik used in the Iranian and Turkish worlds The traditional explanation of the term goes back at least to E. Quatremere, Histoire des sultans mamelouks de I'Egypte, ii/2, Paris 1۸۴۵, ۱۵۴–۵, and was set forth, e.g. , in Barthold's E71 art. This derives Tazik, etc. / Tadjik from the name of the Arab tribe of Tayyi1 [q.v.], Syriac Tayyaye, meaning "Arabs", said to have been the first Arab tribe encountered by the Persians in pre-Islamic times (this would presumably be from contacts with the Lakhmids [q.v.] of al-Hlra, who used the Tayyi1 as frontier guards in 'Irak, with lyas b. Kablsa al-TaJI in A.D. 602 actually taking over the wardenship of the marches from the Lakhmids), so that the Persians then applied it to the Arabs in general. The usage of the term may, however, be older than the 6th century. It spread eastwards with the Arab advance through Persia in the 7th century A.D. , and when Arab troops reached Transoxania and first encountered members of the Western Turkish empire, the latter gradually took over the term, at first applying it to all Muslims (between whose component ethnic groups they did not as yet distinguish) but subsequently to the Iranian peoples of Transoxania and then Persia proper, as the Muslim people with whom they were, by that time, most in contact. From the Turkish side, the Turks' nomadic, steppe background led them to use Tazik, etc. , as applied essentially to sedentary agriculturists and town dwellers, somewhat disparagingly.[...]tdzi "Arab" goes back to a MP *tazik/g and Middle Parthian *tdzik/g which was an Iranian caique on Tayyaye arising quite early in the Christian era (possibly on analogy with MP rdzik/g as the ethnic adjective from the city of al-Rayy, rhyming closely with Tayyi', and especially with its truncated form Tayy). Thus coined in western Persia to denote "Arab", the term would then have been carried by Persians and Parthians, traders and others, into various parts of Central Asia, but more probably by Parthians, the western neighbours of Sogdia, given the Sogdian spelling t'zyk - tdzik/g. When, on the other hand, Arabs or Muslims in Central Asia are referred to, in the sources from the 8th century onwards, as Tazik with z, it must have been Persians who introduced the name or confirmed it by then established Persian pronunciation with z> The majority of Persian invaders of Transoxania in early Islamic times were, however, no less Muslim than their Arab commanders, to whom they, for ethnic and not for religious distinction from themselves, referred as Tazik/g. Hence Barthold and Schaeder thought it possible that the name Tadjik, as today applied to and used by native speakers of the form of Persian language current in what is now the former Tadjikistan SSR, finds its ultimate explanation in a restriction to the meaning "Persian", by the still un-Islamised Turks of Inner Asia, of a term originally meaning "Arab", which they had come to use in the sense of Muslim. "