The Yagnobi language preservation project team and community members in the mountainous village of Zumand.
Indigenous to the vast mountains of Tajikistan, the Yagnobi people have experienced a tremendous language loss after decades of forced and necessary migration. With funding from the Genographic Legacy Fund, a team of Yagnobi linguists from the Rudaki Institute of Language and Literature initiated the Yagnobi language revitalization project "Exploring and Conserving the Disappearing Yagnobi Language in Tajikistan." Project manager Dr. Bahriddin Aliev shares some of the successes of the project:
The Yaghnob valley is the living museum of history, culture and ancient Iranian languages and all Indo-Europeans. Keeping the language, culture and ethnographic features of Yaghnobi people has great importance.
After the collapse of the Soviet system, there were not any funds allocated for 'minor' languages. Therefore, it was important for us to organize visits to the Yagnobi-speaking areas to conduct surveys and to speak with the Yagnobi people. This was the first part of the project. The second part of the project consisted of publishing two dictionaries and preparing a modern Yagnobi textbook and a Yagnobi alphabet.
Throughout history, Yagnobians have never had this kind of Yagnobi textbook. Many researchers from Europe and Russia studied Yagnobi language and culture from the 19th century and published many articles and books, but they were all written in Russian or English and were not accessible to Yagnobians. This is the first time that Yagnobians have had comprehensive and modern books.
The Yagnobi Language Textbook, Yagnobi-Tajiki Dictionary and the Yagnobi Language Alphabet were created and distributed as part of the project to help revitalize the declining Yagnobi language.We met with Yagnobi people of different ages and professions to find out their thoughts and ideas concerning the preservation of Yagnobi language. They also completed a questionnaire about the current state of the Yagnobi language and made they made recommendations for its preservation. Teachers and schoolchildren, women and men, old and young people were interviewed.
Upon studying the survey results, the project team decided to first prepare two dictionaries: a Yagnobi-Tajik dictionary and a Yagnobi-Tajik-English dictionary. After that, based on the present state of people's knowledge of the language and the materials already produced by different local and foreign researchers, the project team started to compile the modern Yagnobi textbook. This textbook has been the result of the hard work of 3 team members over 7 months. Yagnobi children also never had an alphabet book in their language, so we spent 3 months creating the Yagnobi alphabet book.
The process of distributing the Yagnobi books (4,000 copies) is ongoing and we will distribute them to Yagnobi communities, primarily teachers, village libraries and school libraries. We will also announce that any interested Yagnobi may contact us and receive one copy of each book.
Though this project is officially complete, for the future for the strengthening Yagnobi language, we hope to begin other projects including a multimedia Yagnobi language textbook and to conduct language trainings for the Yagnobi people.
All the best wishes
Bahriddin Aliev
