Yaghnobi people 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.

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 sometimes 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, a dialect of Persian. Yaghnobi is mostly used for daily family communication, and Tajik is used by Yaghnobi-speakers for business and formal transactions. A 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 assumption by some that Yaghnobi or some derivative of it was used as a secret code.

The Yaghnob (Tajik: Яғноб) is a river in Ayni District of Sughd Region, Tajikistan. Together with the Iskander Darya, it forms the Fan Darya, a major left tributary of the Zeravshan.

The source of the Yaghnob is in the Matcha Mountains, where the Zarafshan and the Gissar Ranges merge. The Yaghnob is mainly fed by glaciers and snow fields. The river flows from the east to the west, south of and parallel to the upper Zeravshan River, through the Yaghnob Valley, a remote location populated by the Yaghnobi people speaking the eponymous Yaghnobi language. The main village in the valley is Anzob. It joins the east-flowing Iskander Darya to form the Fan Darya which flows north to join the Zeravshan at Ayni. The main road north from Dushanbe follows the lower Yaghnob and the Fan Darya. Before the Soviets blasted a road through, the upper valley was geographically isolated due to the presence of a deep gorge, contributing to the limited interaction with outside populations.