YAGHNOB, Tajikistan -- The picturesque Yaghnob Valley, which lies just north of Dushanbe, is home to about 500 people living scattered in the remote area’s semi-deserted villages.
Once home to about 4,000 people, Yaghnob lost most of its inhabitants in 1970 when they were forcibly relocated by Soviet officials to the farming district of Zafarobod to grow cotton.
Many returned to Yaghnob in the 1990s, only to leave it again because of a lack of jobs and the hardships of daily life in the isolated, mountainous location.
As their community shrinks, the villagers fear that their ancient mother tongue -- Yaghnobi, an Eastern Iranian language -- will die out if the government and native speakers themselves don’t take action to preserve it.
The Yaghnobi people want their language to be added to the school curriculum for local children.
But there are no schools in the Yaghnob Valley. The children are taken to a state boarding school, some 40 kilometers away in the town of Anzob, where they study in Tajik, the state language.
Many children almost forget their mother tongue as they spend the entire school year away from their home villages often cut off by heavy snowfall during the winter.
The ruins of an abandoned village in Yaghnob
“In the 1990s, the primary school [for the Yaghnobi children] began teaching this language and textbooks were written for it,” says Rustam Ramazoni, a linguist who studies Yaghnobi. “Teaching the language was crucial as the number of native speakers has declined.”
But the program was abandoned by the state in the early 2000s, depriving the Yaghnobi children from the already limited education they received in their mother tongue.
The villagers, who are bilingual, use their native language for daily communication among themselves while relying on Tajik for education and business. Their children grow up speaking Yaghnobi only until they go to school, locals told RFE/RL.
Young People's Dilemma
The older generation of people in Yaghnob recall how they returned from Zafarobod to their deserted villages when the government stopped its relocation program to cotton-producing areas.
Safarali Boqiev, a resident of the Piskon village, was in his early 20s when he decided he would never leave his ancestral region.
“I returned to Yaghnob after completing the army service in 1988. I got married here. We have seven children,” Boqiev said. “We get by and I don’t want to leave because our language will disappear [if we all leave.]
But many others are not willing to stay in the valley, which has no proper roads, hospital, or leisure facilities.
A bridge in Yaghnob
There are no professional jobs in Yaghnob, where people are mostly engaged in farming, growing potatoes, and raising livestock.
During the winter -- when the valley gets cut off by snow and ice for up to seven months -- people rely on donkeys for emergency trips, such as taking the sick to hospital.
Firuza Muharramova, a resident of the village of Kyorte, told RFE/RL that she gave birth to all of her three children at home. There was no doctor or a midwife to help her.
Yaghnob is off the electrical power network. In recent years, the residents have built their own small, electricity-generating plants using the area’s abandoned water resources.
SEE ALSO: Linguists Scramble To Save The World's LanguagesThere are projects to turn the valley into a unique tourism hub -- even with several Western volunteers helping to develop the budding sector. Locals hope such projects could create jobs and bring investment to the valley.
But that hasn’t stopped people, especially the young, from relocating to cities.
“We want our young people to stay in Yaghnob, because our language will be lost if they leave. Our language will go extinct, it’s obvious,” Boqiev said. “But our children don’t want to live here.”
The villages in Yaghnob offer a scenic blend of mud-brick houses and old, abandoned ruins, with a handful of modern dwellings built by those determined to stay.
Those who left the valley admit they are finding it difficult to keep their language alive away from home.
A Yaghnobi woman collects dry manure fuel.
Members of the Yaghnobi community in Zafarobod say they’re witnessing their language and the entire culture dying out.
“When you go to our weddings here, up to 95-98 percent of the songs are Tajik songs,” said Mirzo Ramazonov, a Zafarobod resident.
“We lost most of our traditions since moving to Zafarobod,” said Yaghnobi poet Saidmurod Kholov. “Even those who speak Yaghnobi, they mix it with Tajik words and phrases.”
Sharofat Sharifova lives in the capital, Dushanbe, after moving out of Yaghnob with her family several years ago.
Sharifova says members of the small Yaghnobi community in Dushanbe still speak their mother tongue, but she believes it will die out when the older generation is gone.