Etymology
Tajikistan means the "Land of the Tajiks". The word Tajik was used by medieval Turks to refer to Iranian-speaking peoples. From the 11th century, the term referred to East Iranian people, but by the 15th century came to be applied to Persian speakers. In medieval Persian literature, Tajik appears as a synonym of "Persian".
As a self-designation, the term Tajik (Tajik: Тоҷик), has become acceptable only during the last decades of the 20th century, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. The term does not denote an ethnic group in the narrow sense, but remains a general designation of a variety of Persian-speaking peoples in Central Asia.
Tajikistan was frequently spelled as Tadjikistan or Tadzhikistan in English, transliterated from the Russian. (In Russian the phoneme /d͡ʒ/ in Таджикистан is spelled дж, that is, dzh or dj.) Tadzhikistan is the most common alternate spelling and is widely used in English literature derived from Russian sources. "Tadjikistan" is the spelling in French and can occasionally be found in English language texts.
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