Tajik or Tajiki , also called Tajiki Persian ( ) is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is mutually intelligible and closely related to Persian spoken in Iran and Dari Persian spoken in Afghanistan. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Tajik has been considered by a number of writers and researchers to be a variety of Persian (Halimov 1974: 30–31, Oafforov 1979: 33). The popularity of this conception of Tajik as a (less prestigious) variety of Persian was such that, during the period in which Tajik intellectuals were trying to establish Tajik as a language separate from Persian, Sadriddin Ayni, who was a prominent intellectual and educator, had to make a statement that Tajik was not a bastardized dialect of Persian. The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a single language or two discrete languages has political sides to it (see Perry 1996). Today Tajik is recognized as an autonomous West-Iranian language, independent from Persian and Dari, though genetically linked to them.