Shughni-Rushani: Language group within the family of Pamir languages, which belong to the Modern Eastern Iranian languages. Languages of the Shughni-Rushani group are spoken in the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan, particularly in the autonomous region of Badakhshan; in the Afghan province of Badakhshan; and in Xinjiang in China.
The Shughni-Rushani language group consists of five languages: Shughni, with the Bajuv and Shahdara dialects; Rushani, with the Xuf dialect; Bartangi; Roshorvi; and Sariqoli, which is spoken in China.
Shughni is the most important language in the Shughni-Rushani group, being the language of the capital of Tajik Badakshan, Khorog, and a lingua franca within Badakhshan. None of the languages of the Shughni-Rushani group has achieved the status of a written language, although recently attempts have been made to design a suitable script for Shughni; Tajik or Persian is generally used for writing.
The majority of the speakers of Shughni-Rushani are IsmailisAdherents of a branch of Shi’i Islam that considers Ismail, the eldest son of the Shi’i Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765), as his successor., for whom Persian is also important as a language of religion. There are no recent reliable data regarding the number of speakers of Shughni-Rushani: a very rough estimate is around three hundred thousand people. Descriptions of these languages and most of the dialects are available in Russian.
This article by Gabrielle van den Berg was originally published in The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, 2004.
Author
Dr. Gabrielle Van den Berg
Born in Leiden, Gabrielle van den Berg studied Persian language and literature at the University of Leiden from 1985 to 1991, of which one year was spent at Lenin University in Dushanbe. In 1991, Dr van den Berg graduated with her thesis on the classical Persian qasidas of the Ghaznavid poet Farrukhi Sistani. In 1992, she obtained a research-teaching post at the University of Leiden in order to write her PhD thesis on the sung poetry of the Ismailis of Badakhshan, for which extensive fieldwork was carried out in the region. After defending her thesis in 1997, she worked as a lecturer in Persian at the University of Leiden until October 1998 when she was appointed E G Browne Lecturer in Persian at the University of Cambridge, which is a position she will hold until October 2001. Currently she is working for the Institute on a project entitled Living Traditions of the Ismaili World: The Case of Tajik Badakhshan.