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Originally Posted by Mute_Clouds
The song is good, but she is not singing in russian right?
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She sings in Tajik, and i'll repost here something i posted in the "Russian videos" thread:
Tajik belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, the Persian branch. It is not at all related to the Arabic languages which belongs to the Semitic family of languages.
Tajik is very closely related to Farsi, the main language of Iran (as far as i know, Tajik and Farsi speakers understand each other), and both languages are in fact variants of the same language known as Persian. Persian is a very ancient language, attested since the 6th century BC when it was written in cuneiforms as the language of the Persian Empire.
Like Greek, Persian is one of the very few languages that were spoken in one of the first civilizations and are still spoken today. So Tajik has a very ancient and rich history.
Tajiks are among those people who got kinda screwed up by history. Their ancient Persian ancestors settled in areas that used to be the borders of a powerful empire, but when the Persian Empire collapsed, those people became isolated from the home land and found themselves under the rule of other empires (Mongol then Chinese Empire in the East, Arab and Ottoman Empires in the West, and finally the Russian Empire expanded from the north and ruled the region until recently.
Maybe that's why Tajik has interested Shap, it was the language of an ancient civilization that ruled the whole region between Greece and India, then collapsed and some of their descendants became oppressed minorities.