Tajiks of Xinjiang in the context of "Tajik people"

Tajiks (Dari: تاجیکان, Tajik: Тоҷикон), also spelled Tadzhiks or Tadjiks, are a group of various Persian-speaking Eastern Iranian groups of people native to Central Asia, living mainly in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Even though the term Tajik does not refer to a cohesive cross-national ethnic group, Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, and the second-largest in both Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. They speak variations of Persian, a west Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are considered a separate ethnic group.

As a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik, which originally had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians, has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Fārsīwān (Persian-speaker), and Dīhgān (cf. Tajik: Деҳқон) which translates to "farmer or settled villager", in a wider sense "settled" in contrast to "nomadic" and was later used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as "Persian of noble blood" in contrast to Arabs, Turks and Romans during the Sassanid and early Islamic period.