Tajiks in the context of "Northern Uzbek"

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (Persian: جلال‌الدین محمّد رومی), or simply Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273), was a Sufi mystic and poet whose followers went on to found the Mevlevi Order most famous for its whirling dervishes – a practice that he instigated. Rumi is a seminal figure in Sufism, or mystical Islam, whose thought and works loom large in both Persian literature and mystic poetry in general, with his translated works being enjoyed globally to this day.

Rumi's works are written in his mother tongue, Persian. He occasionally used the Arabic language and single Turkish and Greek words in his verse. His Masnavi (Mathnawi), composed in Konya, is considered one of the greatest poems of the Persian language. Rumi's influence has transcended national borders and ethnic divisions: Iranians, Afghans, Tajiks, Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Central Asian Muslims, as well as Muslims of the Indian subcontinent have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries. His poetry influenced not only Persian literature, but also the literary traditions of the Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu, and Bengali languages.

The Afghanistan–Tajikistan border is 1,357 km (843 mi) in length and runs from the tripoint with Uzbekistan in the west to the tripoint with the Xinjiang region of China in the east, almost entirely along the Amu Darya, Pyanj and Pamir Rivers, except for the easternmost section along the Wakhan Corridor and divides the ethnic Tajik community into citizens of two separate countries.

As of 2025, Afghanistan has an estimated population of around 49.5 million people. The country is characterized by a highly diverse, multi-ethnic, and multilingual society, reflecting its historical position at the crossroads of Central, South, and Western Asia, along ancient trade and invasion routes. The four major ethnic categories in the country are Pashtun, Tajik/Farsiwan, Hazara, and Uzbek. In addition, Afghanistan has a plethora of minor ethnic categories, including Turkmen, Baloch, Aimaq, Nuristani, Arab and many others. Together they make up the contemporary Afghan people.

Approximately 43% of the population was under the age of 15, and about 74% of Afghans lived in rural areas as of 2016. The country has one of the highest fertility rates in the world outside of Africa, with the average woman giving birth to five children over her lifetime. Around 6.8% of infants die during childbirth or early infancy. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the nation's average life expectancy was estimated at about 63 years as of 2019. The prevalence of HIV remains very low, affecting only about 0.04% of the population.

Uzbek is a Karluk Turkic language spoken by Uzbeks. It is the official and national language of Uzbekistan and formally succeeded Chagatai, an earlier Karluk language endonymically called Türki or Türkçe, as the literary language of Uzbekistan in the 1920s.

According to the Joshua Project, Southern Uzbek and Standard Uzbek are spoken as a native language by more than 34 million people around the world, making Uzbek the second-most widely spoken Turkic language after Turkish. There are about 36 million Uzbeks around the world, and the reason why the number of speakers of the Uzbek language is greater than that of ethnic Uzbeks themselves is because many other ethnic groups such as Tajiks, Kazakhs, Russians who live in Uzbekistan speak Uzbek as their second language.

The Uzbeks (Uzbek: Oʻzbeklar; Ўзбеклар; اۉزبېکلر‎) are a Turkic ethnic group native to Central Asia, being the largest Turkic ethnic group in the area. They comprise the majority population of Uzbekistan, next to Tajiks and Karakalpak minorities, and also form minority groups in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia, and China. Uzbek diaspora communities also exist in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, United States, Ukraine, Pakistan, and other countries.

Tajik, Tajik Persian, Tajiki Persian, also called Tajiki, is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by ethnic Tajiks. It is closely related to neighbouring Dari of Afghanistan with which it forms a continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of the Persian language. Several scholars consider Tajik as a dialectal variety of Persian rather than a language on its own. The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political aspects to it.

By way of Early New Persian, Tajik, like Iranian Persian and Dari Persian, is a continuation of Middle Persian, the official administrative, religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC).

Afghans (Pashto: افغانان; Dari: افغان‌ها) are the citizens and nationals of Afghanistan, as well as their descendants in the Afghan diaspora. The country is made up of various ethnic groups, of which Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks are the largest. The three main languages spoken among the Afghan people are Dari (a variety of Persian), Pashto, and Uzbek. Historically, the term "Afghan" was a Pashtun ethnonym, but later came to refer to all people in the country, regardless of their ethnicity after the 1964 Constitution of Afghanistan proposed by the King of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah.

In the 16th century, the Tsardom of Russia embarked on a campaign to expand the Russian frontier to the east. This effort continued until the 19th century under the Russian Empire, when the Imperial Russian Army succeeded in conquering all of Central Asia. The majority of this land became known as Russian Turkestan—the name "Turkestan" was used to refer to the area due to the fact that it was and is inhabited by Turkic peoples, excluding the Tajiks, who are an Iranian ethnicity. Upon witnessing Russia's absorption of the various Central Asian realms, the British Empire sought to reinforce India, triggering the Great Game, which ended when both sides eventually designated Afghanistan as a neutral buffer zone.

Although the Russian Empire collapsed during World War I, the Russian sphere of influence remained in what was Soviet Central Asia until 1991. This region now comprises Kazakhstan in the north, Uzbekistan in the centre, Kyrgyzstan in the east, Tajikistan in the southeast, and Turkmenistan in the southwest; the Russian language is still recognized in some capacity in many of these countries.

Dushanbe is the capital and largest city of Tajikistan. As of February 2023, Dushanbe had a population of 1,228,400, with this population being largely Tajik. Until 1929, the city was known in Russian as Dyushambe, and from 1929 to 1961 as Stalinabad, after Joseph Stalin. Dushanbe is located in the Gissar Valley, bounded by the Gissar Range in the north and east and the Babatag, Aktau, Rangontau and Karatau mountains in the south, and has an elevation of 750–930 m. The city is divided into four districts: Ismail Samani, Avicenna, Ferdowsi, and Shah Mansur.

In ancient times, what is now or is close to modern Dushanbe was settled by various empires and peoples, including Mousterian tool-users, various neolithic cultures, the Achaemenid Empire, Greco-Bactria, the Kushan Empire, and Hephthalites. In the Middle Ages, more settlements began near modern-day Dushanbe such as Hulbuk and its famous palace. From the 17th to early 20th century, Dushanbe grew into a market village controlled at times by the Beg of Hisor, Balkh, and finally Bukhara, before being conquered by the Russian Empire. Dushanbe was captured by the Bolsheviks in 1922, and the town was made the capital of the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924, which commenced Dushanbe's development and rapid population growth that continued until the Tajik Civil War. After the war, the city became capital of an independent Tajikistan and continued its growth and development into a modern city, today home to many international conferences.