Samarkand's Tajik Heart: The City's Other Language
Much of Samarkand speaks Tajik, not Uzbek. What that means for visitors, why the numbers are disputed, and how to be a respectful guest in the old city.
Stand in a queue at Siab bazaar and listen. A fair amount of what you hear isn't Uzbek. It's Tajik, a variety of Persian, and it has been the everyday language of Samarkand's old neighbourhoods for a very long time.
This is one of the more interesting things about the city and one of the least discussed in travel writing, partly because it touches on politics and partly because the numbers are genuinely unclear. Here's what can be established, what can't, and why any of it matters to a visitor.
Two languages, two families
Uzbek is a Turkic language. Tajik is an Iranian one, closely related to the Persian of Iran and the Dari of Afghanistan, and written in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in Cyrillic rather than the Perso-Arabic script. They aren't dialects of one another. A monolingual Uzbek speaker and a monolingual Tajik speaker cannot hold a conversation.
In practice almost nobody in Samarkand is monolingual. Most people in the old city move between Tajik at home, Uzbek in official settings and Russian with outsiders, often inside a single sentence. The local Tajik of Samarkand and Bukhara also diverges noticeably from the standard literary language used in Dushanbe, enough that Tajikistani visitors comment on it.
How many people, and why nobody can tell you
This is where it gets murky, and we'd rather say so than invent precision.
The government does not publish figures for the number of ethnic Tajiks in the city of Samarkand. The state statistics agency has put Tajiks at roughly 5 percent of the national population. For the wider Samarkand Region, the 2021 census counted 280,447 Tajiks.
Independent researchers and rights organisations consider those figures low, for a specific and documented reason: after independence some Tajiks registered as Uzbek, in order not to be disadvantaged in employment and access to state benefits. Ethnicity on a Soviet-era internal passport was an administrative fact with consequences, as much as it was a question of identity. So the census counts a legal category, not necessarily what people speak at home.
What can be said with confidence is narrower and more useful: Tajik is spoken by a very large share of the population in the old quarters of both Samarkand and Bukhara, and has been for centuries. Anyone who tells you a precise percentage for the city is guessing.
Why a Persian-speaking city sits in Uzbekistan
The short answer is 1924.
Before the Soviet Union, Central Asia wasn't organised into ethnic nation states. The Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva were dynastic territories where Persian and Turkic were both in use, Persian as the language of administration and literature and Turkic as the language of the court and much of the countryside. Samarkand and Bukhara were Persian-speaking cultural capitals with Turkic-speaking hinterlands.
The national delimitation of 1924 to 1936 drew republics along ethnolinguistic lines that had never existed as borders. Samarkand and Bukhara, the two historic centres of Persianate culture in the region, ended up inside the Uzbek SSR. Tajikistan got Dushanbe, which had been a village. That outcome still produces resentment among some Tajik intellectuals, and it's one reason this subject is handled carefully on both sides of the border.
If the older layers interest you, our account of the Emirate of Bukhara covers the world that existed before those lines were drawn.
The schools question
The clearest measurable trend is in education, and it points one way.
Tajik-language schools in Uzbekistan fell from around 318 in 2001 to 256 by the 2012 to 2013 school year. In the city of Samarkand itself, reporting by Eurasianet found instruction in Tajik reduced to a single mixed Tajik and Uzbek primary school. Parents who want their children educated in Tajik have limited options, and many choose Uzbek or Russian schooling for straightforward career reasons.
Language transmission tends to follow schooling within a generation or two. Whether Samarkand is still a substantially Tajik-speaking city in fifty years is an open question, and locals will tell you so.
The shared inheritance problem
One consequence of the 1924 borders is that two countries now claim the same set of historical figures, and both claims are defensible.
The Samanid dynasty of the 9th and 10th centuries, which ruled from Bukhara and presided over the revival of written Persian, is a national symbol in Tajikistan: the currency is the somoni, named after its founder. The dynasty's finest surviving monument, the Ismail Samani mausoleum, stands in Bukhara, inside Uzbekistan. Rudaki, generally treated as the first major poet of the Persian language, came from near Panjakent, just over the modern border. Ibn Sina, the physician known in Europe as Avicenna, was born near Bukhara and wrote in Arabic and Persian.
Uzbekistan presents these figures as part of its own heritage, on the territorial argument. Tajikistan presents them as Tajik, on the linguistic one. Neither country is being dishonest; the categories simply didn't exist when these people were alive. Our piece on Ibn Sina and Bukhara takes the same approach, which is to give the region its due rather than assign it a nationality.
Bukhara's situation mirrors Samarkand's, incidentally. It is the other historically Persian-speaking city inside Uzbekistan, with the same pattern of Tajik at home and Uzbek in public, and the same absence of reliable city-level figures.
What a visitor actually notices
Less than you'd expect, unless you're listening for it.
Signage, menus and officialdom are in Uzbek, Russian and English. Hotel staff and guides work in Uzbek and Russian. The Tajik is in the background: in the bazaar, between family members, in the lanes behind Shah-i-Zinda, in what people call each other.
You will notice it in names and words, though. Non for bread, osh for plov, the -obod and -kent endings on place names, the Persian vocabulary running through the food and the architecture. Once you know that Samarkand's everyday speech is Persian, a lot of the city's vocabulary stops looking random.
The temperature now
It's worth saying that this is a much calmer subject than it was twenty years ago. Relations between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were frosty for most of the 1990s and 2000s, with closed crossings, mined sections of border and suspended flights. Since 2016 they've improved substantially: crossings have reopened, air links resumed, and the Samarkand to Panjakent route is usable again by travellers. That thaw has taken most of the heat out of the language question in daily life, even where the underlying issues remain. Visitors arriving now will find the whole thing far less charged than older writing suggests.
How to handle it as a guest
Our honest advice is: be interested, don't be a journalist.
- Learn a couple of words of both. Rahmat works as thank you in Uzbek; rahmat or tashakkur in Tajik. People notice and it lands well. Our phrase guide covers the Uzbek side.
- Don't ask people to pick a side. "Are you Uzbek or Tajik?" is a question with a legal answer, a family answer and a political answer, and a stranger asking it puts someone in an awkward position.
- Don't repeat the border grievance. Whatever you've read about 1924, it isn't your argument to have, and relations between the two countries have improved markedly since 2016.
- Do accept the tea. If a conversation opens up and someone wants to tell you about their family's languages, that's a gift. Let them lead.
Where to hear it
Not the monuments. The Registan is a ticketed space full of visitors and guides working in English.
Go to Siab bazaar in the morning, walk the residential lanes around the shrine complexes, or sit in a chaikhana anywhere off the tourist route. The mahalla streets behind the big sights are where the city talks to itself. Bukhara works the same way, which is one of several reasons the two cities feel different despite sharing a history.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do people in Samarkand speak Tajik or Uzbek?
Both, and usually the same people speak both. Tajik, a variety of Persian, is widely used at home and in the old quarters, while Uzbek is the state language used in schools, signage and official business. Russian is common as a third language. Most residents switch between them without thinking about it.
Is Tajik the same as Persian or Farsi?
Tajik is a variety of Persian, closely related to the Farsi of Iran and the Dari of Afghanistan, and speakers of one can largely understand the others. The main difference is script: Tajik is written in Cyrillic in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while Iranian Persian uses the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Samarkand's spoken variety also differs from standard literary Tajik.
How many Tajiks live in Samarkand?
Nobody publishes a reliable figure for the city. The 2021 census counted 280,447 Tajiks in Samarkand Region, and the state statistics agency puts Tajiks at around 5 percent nationally. Researchers consider these undercounts, because some Tajiks registered as Uzbek after independence to avoid disadvantage in jobs and benefits.
Why is Samarkand not part of Tajikistan?
Because of the Soviet national delimitation of 1924 to 1936, which created republics along ethnolinguistic lines that had not previously been borders. Samarkand and Bukhara, both historic centres of Persianate culture, were placed inside the Uzbek SSR. The decision is still debated by historians and remains a sensitive subject.
Is it awkward to ask locals about this?
It can be. Ethnicity and language carry real administrative weight here, and asking a stranger to define themselves puts them on the spot. If someone raises it, listen. If they don't, leave it. Being curious about the food, the words and the history of the city is welcome; pressing on politics is not.
Sources: Eurasianet on Tajik-language schooling in Samarkand and the census question, and Minority Rights Group for the background on Tajiks in Uzbekistan (last checked: September 2026).
Featured image: Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons.