1 How Tajik was made into a national language

Abstract

The establishment of Soviet power in Central Asia, among many other social spheres, greatly changed the ethnic and linguistic realities. Based on contemporary publications from 1919 to the late 1920s, this chapter examines how the Persian- speaking population of Central Asia tried to orient itself under the new political circumstances. Already in 1919, the Bolsheviks appealed to the local population to organize into so-called “national sections” but only selected Persian-speaking groups in Samarkand responded to this appeal and founded a “Persian section” whereas other groups in mind did not feel addressed by this appeal. As an argument to join the “Persian Section”, the ideologeme of “mother tongue” was introduced. The historical roots of this ideologeme are questioned here and its function in the language-political debates of those years is examined. It is asked why the originally planned project of a “Persian nation” could not prevail and was soon abandoned. Attention is drawn to the question how the established practice of biand multilingualism and the competing project of a “Turkistani nation” affected the language policy debates of the period. It is argued that the territorial-administrative reorganization of Central Asia in 1924 brought about a change in the attitude of many Persian-speaking groups toward their first language what was subsequently accompanied by the emergence of a Tajik national consciousness. The new political circumstances meant that a language once considered the leading language of culture, education and Islamic religion in a multilingual milieu was transformed into a language whose function was largely reduced to its role as the first language of a speech community defined according to newly introduced ‘national’ criteria. Outwardly, this change in the function of a language manifested itself in the change of the language’s name: “Persian” became “Tajik”.