Poet believes using Persian alphabet in Tajikistan possible but needs time

Speaking to Tajikistan Ferje news agency, Ghanaat said at the periodic meeting on dialogue among civilizations, 'During former Soviet Union era, we were seeking both Persian and Cyrillic writing systems. At that time, we wanted to use Cyrillic as well as Farsi scripts because of conditions those days; our intention was to seize the chance but failed to do so and today, we are left undecided on either of the both.'

Now it's hard to get back to our initial writing system because our first script was cuneiform and Avesta is cuneiform, said the poet, adding that later our script was Soghdi, despite gaining limited progress. At any rate, he added, recourse to the Persian alphabet is not possible at once, he added.

Tajik is a variety of Persian language spoken in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Afghanistan by about 4.4 million people. The Persian language in this region was renamed Tajik by Stalin in 1932 in order to distance Persian speakers in Central Asia from Persian speakers in Iran.

Before 1928, Tajik was written with a version of the Perso-Arabic script, then with the Latin alphabet between 1928 to 1940, then with a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet thereafter. In 1989, the Tajik government passed a law calling for the reintroduction of the Arabic alphabet. There are also some people in favour of switching to the Latin alphabet.

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