Shughni language

The Shughni people in Tajikistan identify as an ethnic minority; the official language, required for media and education, is Tajik. Many Shughni speakers living in Tajikistan speak it to some degree, while Shughni is predominantly used in everyday conversation^[4][5].

Shughni also serves as a secondary, more local lingua franca for communication in the regional capital of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region—the city of Khorog—as well as throughout the region and even beyond^[6][7][8]. In Tajikistan, Shughni is not formally taught in schools, though it may be used unofficially for communication between teachers and students in primary grades^[9].

According to the 1980s data, about 50,000 Shughnis lived in GBAO.^[2] As of 1997, approximately 100,000 people spoke Shughni^[8].

Shughni speakers in Afghanistan are mostly monolingual. In Afghanistan, Shughni was unofficially taught in schools^[10], and in the 2010s a Shughni program for primary school students was created^[11].

According to the All-Union Population Census of the USSR in the 1920s, only six people reported Shughni as their native language—for unknown reasons, some ethnic groups, including the Shughni, did not report their language^[12]. By the 1980s, about 50,000 Shughni lived in GBAO, and in Afghan Shighnan, according to researcher Dodkhudo Karamshoev [ru], at least 25,000^[13]. As of 1997, approximately 100,000 people spoke Shughni^[14]. According to Joy Edelman [ru], the number of Shughni speakers ranges from 80,000 to 100,000^[15], while Katja Mueller estimates around 130,000^[16].

The Shughni language is listed in the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger as "vulnerable". On the EGIDS scale, it has a status of 6a, or "vigorous"^[10]. This means it is used in oral communication in informal settings and learned by children as a native language, despite a relatively small number of speakers, though in many communicative domains (education, culture, and science) it is often displaced by other languages^[17][18]. Therefore, Shughni is currently not endangered, but it may potentially face risk of extinction in the future.

Rushani, Bartangi, Oroshori (Roshorvi), Khufi and Shughni proper are considered to be dialects. However, Bartangi and Khufi are quite distinct and may be separate languages.

Shughni people live in both Afghanistan and Tajikistan. For the past 100 years, each country has had diverging literary traditions and orthographic standards. On either side of the border, Shughni literaturists, being previously an unwritten language, has relied heavily on the existing orthographic standards and conventions in coming up with an orthography for Shughni language.

In Tajikistan, Persian alphabet was discarded in 1928, being replaced by Latin alphabet, and 11 years afterwards in 1939, Latin alphabet being replaced by Cyrillic alphabet. Tajik Cyrillic alphabet is of course based on Russian orthography, and similar to that of Uzbek language in neighboring Uzbekistan. Thus, the alphabets developed in Tajikistan for Shughni language, have been Cyrillic and Latin.

In Afghanistan, Dari (Afghan Persian), with the well-established Persian script, is the literary language of the nation. Pashto language too, with its own alphabet, derived from Persian, but with unique features and conventions, is the co-official language of Afghanistan. Thus, the Shughni orthography being developed by literaturists in Afghanistan has been derived from Persian, and borrowing letters from Pashto as needed.

Shughni is a language of the nominative alignment type with certain ergative constructions. The typical word order is SOV: the finite verb form tends to appear at the end of the sentence. An exception is the copula, expressed by personal enclitics; it tends to occur at the beginning of the sentence.

The head noun usually follows the modifier; in the izafet construction borrowed from Persian, this rule is violated. The predicate agrees with the head of the attributive phrase (for example, in the sentence yi qāp žindam tis sut “the sack [fem.] of wheat [masc.] spilled [masc.],” the verb agrees with the name of the substance rather than the measure).^[34]

Unmarked members of the noun phrase occur in the following order: determiner, possessive pronoun, numeral, adjective, noun.^[35]

The Shughni language contains many loanwords from Tajik, as well as from Arabic, especially in cultural and religious spheres, and from Turkic languages via Tajik. There is also a large layer of borrowings from Russian, both through Tajik and directly. To a lesser extent, borrowings from Indo-Aryan languages are noticeable. In addition, there exists areal vocabulary characteristic of the Pamir languages, whose origin is unclear.^[36] There are a small number of modern borrowings from English. Shughni is rich in phraseological expressions, many of which are also found in other Iranian languages.^[37]

• Edelman, D. (Joy) I. and Leila R. Dodykhudoeva (2009). "Shughni." In: Gernot Windfuhr (ed.), The Iranian Languages, 787-824. London & New York: Routledge.
• Olson, Karen (2017). Shughni Phonology Statement. SIL International.
• Zarubin, I. I. (1960). Shugnanskie teksty i slovar. Moskva: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR.