babak and persians hey tajik thanks for the bbc article i did want to talk to you though with regards to the stuff going with the persians i noticed some activity there and realized that someone has added tajiks as 'persians' which in effect negates the tajiks page now the problem with this is the article on the persians will turn into a massive article describing cultural variations and divergent histories etc i'm not sure this is a good way to go tajiks are indeed persians but are as distinct as the slovaks are from the czechs or the croats from serbs both groups speak mutually intelligible languages or basically the same language in addition as you well know many if not most don't call themselves persians anyway most i've met refer to themselves as afghans or will talk of their 'aryan' lineage the way we've set it up on iranian peoples was good in that we had tajiks as a sub type of persians which i believe you put in and thus can have their own article as both a closely related type of central asian persians and as an iranian people with many distinct qualities of their own linking them more to persians in northeast iran rather than those of western iran including the tajiks of tajikistan in addition most references distinguish between the two while clarifying tajiks as an iranian people usually referred to as central asian persians in short after all this i think it's a huge mistake to subsume the tajiks given the weight of history and divergence that has taken place simply due to the vast geographic expanse and the tajiks own unique qualities ciao