Tajik

Tajik is one of the three main standard varieties of Persian, alongside Iranian Farsi and Afghan Dari. The three are mutually intelligible with some adjustment — much like Latin American and European Spanish. Tajik shares the underlying grammar (no gender, ezafe linker, similar verb system) and most vocabulary with the other two, plus Russian and Turkic loans not found in Iran or Afghanistan.

Soviet language policy. Tajik was written in Perso-Arabic until 1928, then in a Latin alphabet (1928–1940), then switched to Cyrillic in 1940 alongside other Central Asian Soviet languages. After Tajikistan's independence in 1991, there were proposals to return to Latin or to adopt the Perso-Arabic script (which would unify written Tajik with its Persian sisters), but Cyrillic remains the official script.

Tajikistan (around 8 million native speakers), Uzbekistan (especially Samarkand and Bukhara, where Tajik has historic roots), Afghanistan (where most Persian is officially called Dari, but the variety in northern provinces shades into Tajik), and parts of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The Tajik diaspora has grown substantially through labour migration to Russia.

No — Tajik shares the gender-free grammar of Persian. There is no masculine/feminine distinction in nouns, adjectives, or pronouns. The third-person pronoun (ӯ in Cyrillic, u in romanization) covers he, she, and it. This is a major simplification compared to Russian (despite Russian's heavy lexical influence on Tajik) and most European languages.

Substantial. Soviet-era education, administration, and technical fields brought thousands of Russian loanwords into Tajik, especially in modern, technical, and political vocabulary. Many of these have been gradually replaced by Persian-derived alternatives in post-independence Tajik language planning, but Russian loans remain pervasive in everyday urban speech and most older publications.