Shughni language

Shughni is one of the Pamir languages of the Southeastern Iranian language group. Its distribution is in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region in Tajikistan, Badakhshan Province in Afghanistan, Chitral district in Pakistan and Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in China.

Shughni-Rushani tends towards SOV word order, distinguishes a masculine and feminine gender in nouns and some adjectives, as well as the 3rd person singular of verbs. Shughni distinguishes between an absolutive and an oblique case in its system of pronouns. Rushani is noted for a typologically unusual 'double-oblique' construction, also called a 'transitive case', in the past tense. Normally Soviet school scientists consider Rushani as a close but independent language to Shughni, while Western school scientists codes Rushani as a dialect of Shughni due to Afghanistan Rushani speakers living in the Shighnan district of Badakhshan Province.

Distribution

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

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. In Tajikistan, Shughni is not formally taught in schools, though it may be used unofficially for communication between teachers and students in primary grades.

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

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

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. By the 1980s, about 50,000 Shughni lived in GBAO, and in Afghan Shighnan, according to researcher Dodkhudo Karamshoev[ru], at least 25,000. As of 1997, approximately 100,000 people spoke Shughni. According to Joy Edelman[ru], the number of Shughni speakers ranges from 80,000 to 100,000, while Katja Mueller estimates around 130,000.

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". 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. Therefore, Shughni is currently not endangered, but it may potentially face risk of extinction in the future.

Dialects

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.

Phonology

Vowels

The following are the vowels of Shughni:

Long vowels occur as /aː, eː, iː, oː, uː/.

Consonants

The following are the consonants of Shughni:

• /r/ can be realised as a trill [r] or a tap [ɾ].
• Velar sounds /x, ɣ/ can also be realised as more fronted palatal sounds [ç, ʝ].

Orthography

Shughni people live in both Afghanistan and Tajikistan. For the past 100 years, the two countries have had diverging orthographic standards. On either side of the border, Shughni literaturists, being previously an unwritten language, have 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. The Tajik Cyrillic alphabet is based on Russian orthography, and similar to that of Uzbek 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 (Eastern Iranian 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 additionally borrowing letters from Pashto if needed.

Historical development

The question of whether the Shughni people possessed an ancient writing system is disputed. The only recorded mention of a possible ancient Shughni script comes from the Chinese traveler Xuanzang in the 7th century CE. In his work Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, he mentions a country called Shiqini, which researchers identify with Shughnan. According to Xuanzang, the writing system of Shiqini was similar to that of the Tocharians, probably referring to the Eastern Iranian Bactrian alphabet.

From the second half of the 19th century, attempts were made to adapt the Persian script for Shughni. Some poetry (e.g., by the poet Mullo Lochin, 1860–1920) and medical or historical works (e.g., by Shohzoda Muhammad) were written in it, but the practice never became widespread.

During the same period, Shughni began to attract scholarly attention. The first Shughni grammar was compiled by the English researcher Robert Shaw in 1877, using a Latin-based transcription with diacritics. In 1883, the Russian scholar D. L. Ivanov produced the first Shughni dictionary; his manuscripts used Cyrillic with additional Latin letters, while the published version employed the Anders Johan Sjögren's Cyrillic alphabet. In the early 20th century, further publications on Shughni appeared, though the language itself remained largely unwritten.

Latin alphabet

The Latin-based writing system used for the Shughni language comprises 39 letters, combining standard Latin characters with diacritical marks and some additional modified letters adopted from the Hellenic alphabet. Although this alphabet has never been officially standardized, it has been widely employed in academic articles and linguistic studies devoted to the Shughni language and related Eastern Iranian Pamir languages:

Persian alphabet

The process of compiling a Persian derived alphabet for Shughni has been a long and iterative one, over a period starting from 2004, with the publication of the first book on phonology and orthography of Shughni language by Khair Mohammad Haidari.

This was followed by a 2011 publication by Dr. Nur Ali Dost from Montreal-based "Sohravardi Foundation for Iranian Studies", a 2011 compilation by Mazhab Shah Zahoori and two other by Alishah Sabbar and Calgary-based Dr. Khush Nazar Parmerzad.

This led to controversy, correspondence, and collaboration between Shughni literaturists and academics, who over the following years, agreed upon specific set of consonants, and a specific standardized way of representing vowels.

The Afghan government has officially adopted Shughni orthography as well, and the Ministry of Education has created textbooks to be used in Badakhshan Province.

Letters

Below table demonstrates the 44-letter Persian-derived Shughni alphabet.

Vowels

Shughni language consists of 10 vowels. There are 3 short vowels, which have 3 corresponding long vowels, and there are 4 additional long vowels. One of the topics of controversy in the process of compiling and standardizing Shughni orthography, was how to express all 9 of the vowels. In this process, modified letters from Pashto and Urdu (themselves being modified versions of the Persian alphabet) have been borrowed (ې‎ and ے‎), a new letter has been created (اۈ‎) and due to a lack of the sound [h], the letter he (هـ ـهـ‎) has been repurposed from a consonant grapheme to a vowel one.

Below tables demonstrate how vowels are to be written in different positions within a word. Note that some vowels don't occur in specific positions in Shughni phonology. Also note that diacritics are generally dropped in writing. Also note that there exists free variation between the short vowels in colloquial Shughni.

Cyrillic and Latin alphabets

Sample Text

Below is a sample text, the first few passages from translations of a British nursery rhyme, The Old Woman and Her Pig.

Syntax

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 ezâfeh 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).

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

Lexicon

The Shughni language contains many loanwords from Tajik Persian, especially in cultural and spheres. There is also a layer of borrowings from Russian. To a lesser extent, a few borrowings from Indo-Aryan languages are noticeable. In addition, there exists areal vocabulary characteristic of the Iranian Pamir languages. 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.

Notes

Literature

• 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.

Further reading

• Mueller, Katja S. (2015). (Master). University of North Dakota.
• Parker, Clinton (2023). (Doctor of Philosophy). McGill University, Department of Linguistics.
• Makarov, Yury (2026). . Phonetica. 83 (1): 1–18. doi:.

External links

• Shughni Wikipedia main page
• (From Unicode)