1.
Wheatgrass
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Wheatgrass is a food prepared from the cotyledons of the common wheat plant, Triticum aestivum. It is sold either as a juice or powder concentrate, Wheatgrass differs from wheat malt in that it is served freeze-dried or fresh, while wheat malt is convectively dried. Wheatgrass is allowed to grow longer than malt, like most plants, it contains chlorophyll, amino acids, minerals, vitamins, and enzymes. Claims about the benefits of wheatgrass range from providing supplemental nutrition to having unique curative properties, though few. It is often available in bars, and some consumers grow. It is available as fresh produce, tablets, frozen juice, Wheatgrass is also available commercially as a spray, cream, gel, massage lotion, and a liquid herbal supplement. Because wheatgrass juice is extracted from wheatgrass sprouts, i. e. before the seed begins to form. Wheat grass can be traced back in history over 5000 years, to ancient Egypt and it is purported that ancient Egyptians found sacred the young leafy blades of wheat and prized them for their positive effect on their health and vitality. The consumption of wheatgrass in the Western world began in the 1930s as a result of experiments conducted by Charles Schnabel in his attempts to popularize the plant and she also taught that wheatgrass could be used to treat those with serious disease. Wigmores recommendations and reputation as a health practitioner have been heavily criticized, Wheatgrass can be grown indoors or outdoors. A common method for sprout production indoors is often on trays in a medium such as a potting mix. Leaves are harvested when they develop a split as another leaf emerges and these can then be cut off with scissors and allow a second crop of shoots to form. Sometimes a third cutting is possible, but may be tougher and have less sugars than the first, schnabels research was conducted with wheatgrass grown outdoors in Kansas. His wheatgrass required 200 days of growth, through the winter and early spring. He claimed that at this stage the plant reached its peak value, after jointing, concentrations of chlorophyll, protein. Wheatgrass grown is harvested, dehydrated at a low temperature and sold in tablet and powdered concentrates for human, indoor grown wheatgrass is used to make wheatgrass juice powder. Proponents of wheatgrass make many claims for its properties, ranging from promotion of general well-being to cancer prevention. However, according to the American Cancer Society, available evidence does not support the idea that wheatgrass or the wheatgrass diet can cure or prevent disease
2.
Albanian language
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Centuries-old communities speaking Albanian-based dialects can be found scattered in Greece, Southern Italy, Sicily, and Ukraine. Due to the large Albanian diaspora, the number of speakers is much higher than the native speakers in Southeast Europe. The first audio recording of Albanian was made by Norbert Jokl on 4 April 1914 in Vienna, the Albanian language is part of the Indo-European language group. In general there is insufficient evidence to connect Albanian with one of those languages, Albanian is now considered an isolate within Indo-European, no extant language shares the same branch. The only other languages that are the surviving member of a branch of Indo-European are Armenian. Although Albanian shares lexical isoglosses with Greek, Balto-Slavic, and Germanic languages, in 1995, Ann Taylor, Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow described as surprising their finding, using quantitative linguistic techniques, that Albanian appears to comprise a subgroup with Germanic. This theory is reinforced by subsequent research by the same authors, Albanian also shares two features with Balto-Slavic languages, a lengthening of syllabic consonants before voiced obstruents and a distinct treatment of long syllables ending in a sonorant. Other conservative features of Albanian include the retention of the distinction between active and middle voice, present tense and aorist. In another but uncommon hypothesis, Albanian is grouped with both Balto-Slavic and Germanic based on the merger of Proto-Indo-European *ǒ and *ǎ into *ǎ in a northern group. However, this shift is now regarded as only part of a larger push chain that affected all long vowels. The earliest loanwords attested in Albanian come from Doric Greek, whereas the strongest influence came from Latin, curtis, the loanwords do not necessarily indicate the geographical location of the ancestor of Albanian language. However, according to linguists, the borrowed words can help to get an idea about the place of origin. The period during which Proto-Albanian and Latin interacted was protracted and drawn out roughly from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD. This is borne out into three layers of borrowings, the largest number belonging to the second layer, which may be compared to, for example. The first, with the fewest borrowings, was a time of less important interaction, the final period, probably preceding the Slavic or Germanic invasions, also has a notably smaller number of borrowings. Other formative changes include the syncretism of several case endings, especially in the plural. Such borrowing indicates that the Romanians migrated from an area where the majority was Slavic to an area with a majority of Albanian speakers and their movement is probably related to the expansion of the Bulgarian Empire into Albania around that time. Jernej Kopitar was the first to note Latins influence on Albanian, Kopitar gave examples such as Albanian qiqer from Latin cicer, qytet from civitas, peshk from piscis and shigjetë from sagitta
3.
Azerbaijani language
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The language has official status in Azerbaijan and Dagestan but it does not have official status in Iranian Azerbaijan, where the majority of Azerbaijanis live. It is also spoken to varying degrees in Azerbaijani communities of Georgia and Turkey and by diaspora communities, primarily in Europe. Azerbaijani is a member of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages, modern literature in Azerbaijan is based on the Shirvani dialect mainly, while in Iranian Azerbaijan region it is based on the Tabrizi one. Azerbaijani evolved from the Eastern branch of Oghuz Turkic which spread to the Caucasus, in Eastern Europe, Persian and Arabic influenced the language, but Arabic words were mainly transmitted through the intermediary of literary Persian. By the beginning of the 16th century, it had become the dominant language of the region, the historical development of Azerbaijani can be divided into two major periods, early and modern. Early Azerbaijani differs from its descendant in that it contained a larger number of Persian. Early writings in Azerbaijani also demonstrate linguistic interchangeability between Oghuz and Kypchak elements in many aspects, despite major differences, they all aimed primarily at making it easy for semi-literate masses to read and understand literature. They all criticized the overuse of Persian, Arabic, and European elements in both colloquial and literary language and called for a simpler and more popular style. Despite the wide use of Azerbaijani in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, after independence, Azerbaijan republic decided to switch back to the Latin script. The first examples of Azerbaijani literature date to the late 1200s following the Mongol conquest and were written in Arabic script, in the 1300s Kadi Burhan al-Din, Hesenoghlu, and Imadaddin Nasimi helped to establish Azerbaiijani as a language through poetry and other literary works. In 1875 Akinchi became the first Azerbaijani newspaper to be published in the Russian Empire and it was started by Hasan bey Zardabi, a journalist and education advocate. Following the rule of the Qajar dynasty Iran was ruled by Reza Shah who banned the publication of texts in Azerbaijani, modern literature in the Republic of Azerbaijan is based on the Shirvani dialect mainly, while in Iranian Azerbaijan it is based on the Tabrizi dialect. Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar is an important figure in Azerbaijani poetry and his most important work is Heydar Babaya Salam and it is considered to be a pinnacle of Azerbaijani literature and gained popularity in the Turkic-speaking world. It was translated more than 30 languages. In the mid-19th century Azerbaijani literature was taught at schools in Baku, Ganja, Shaki, Tbilisi, since 1845, it has also been taught in the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. Per the 1829 Caucasus School Statute, Azerbaijani was to be taught in all schools of Ganja, Shusha, Nukha, Shamakhi, Quba, Baku, Derbent, Yerevan, Nakhchivan, Akhaltsikhe. Beginning in 1834, it was introduced as a language of study in Kutaisi instead of Armenian, in 1853, Azerbaijani became a compulsory language for students of all backgrounds in all of Transcaucasia with the exception of the Tiflis Governorate. Azerbaijani is one of the Oghuz languages within the Turkic language family, the International Organization for Standardization encodes North Azerbaijani and South Azerbaijani as distinct languages
4.
Bashkir language
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The Bashkir language is a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch. It is co-official with Russian in the Republic of Bashkortostan and has approximately 1.2 million speakers in Russia, Bashkir has three dialects, Southern, Eastern and Northwestern. Speakers of Bashkir mostly live in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, many speakers also live in Tatarstan, Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Kurgan Oblasts and other regions of Russia. Minor Bashkir groups also live in Kazakhstan and other countries, the Bashkirs in ancient times used the Old Turkic alphabet. After the adoption of Islam, which began in the 10th century and lasted for several centuries, Turki was written in a variant of the Arabic script. In 1923, a system based on the Arabic script was specifically created for the Bashkir language. At the same time, a Bashkir literary language was created, at first, it used a modified Arabic alphabet. In 1930 it was replaced with a Latin-based alphabet, which was in turn replaced with an adapted Cyrillic alphabet in the winter of 1938. The modern alphabet used by Bashkir is based on the Cyrillic script, with the addition of the following letters, /a/ is phonologically back, but phonetically central. /m, p, b/ are bilabial, whereas /f, v/ are labiodental, /θ, ð/ are dental, whereas /r/ is apical alveolar. The exact place of articulation of the other dental/alveolar consonants is unclear, /j/ varies phonetically from a glide to a laxer non-syllabic vowel. A member of the Turkic language family, Bashkir is an agglutinative, a large part of the Bashkir vocabulary has Turkic roots, and there are many loan words in Bashkir from Russian, Arabic and Persian sources. Machine fund of the Bashkir language
5.
Crimean Tatar language
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Crimean Tatar, also called Crimean Turkish or simply Crimean, is a language spoken for centuries in Crimea. It is a Turkic language spoken in Crimea and the Crimean Tatar diasporas of Uzbekistan, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as communities in the United States. It should not be confused with Tatar proper, spoken in Tatarstan and adjacent regions in Russia, though only distantly related, it has been extensively influenced by nearby Oghuz Turkic languages such as Turkish, Turkmen, and Azerbaijani. Today, more than 260,000 Crimean Tatars live in Crimea, approximately 150,000 reside in Central Asia, where their ancestors had been exiled in 1944 during World War II by the Soviet Union. However, of all people, mostly the older generations are the only ones still speaking Crimean Tatar. In 2013, the language was estimated to be on the brink of extinction, Turkey has provided support to Ukraine, to aid in bringing the schools teaching in Crimean Tatar to a modern state. An estimated 5 million people of Crimean origin live in Turkey, descendants of those who emigrated in the 19th, of these an estimated 2,000 still speak the language. Smaller Crimean Tatar communities are found in Romania, Bulgaria. Crimean Tatar is one of the endangered languages in Europe. Almost all Crimean Tatars are bilingual or multilingual, using as their first language the dominant languages of their home countries, such as Ukrainian, Turkish, Uzbek. Each of the three groups of the Crimean Tatars has its own dialect. The dialect of the Nogays, the inhabitants of the Crimean steppe, is of Kypchak–Nogay origin. The Yalıboylus, who lived on the southern coast of Crimea before 1944, the Tat Tatars from the Crimean Mountains use a middle dialect of Kypchak–Cuman origin. The dialect is a descendant of the Cuman language. The modern Crimean Tatar written language is based on Tat because the Tats comprise about 55% of the total Crimean Tatar population, the forming of the Crimean Tatar spoken dialects began with the first Turkic invasions of Crimea and ended during the period of the Crimean Khanate. However, the written languages of the Crimean Khanate were Chagatai. After Islamization, Crimean Tatars wrote with an Arabic script, in 1876, the different Turkic Crimean dialects were made into a uniform written language by Ismail Gasprinski. A preference was given to the Oghuz dialect of the Yalıboylus, in 1928, the language was reoriented to the middle dialect spoken by the majority of the people
6.
Dari language
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Dari or Dari Persian is the variety of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the officially recognized and promoted since 1964 by the Afghan government for the Persian language. Hence, it is known as Afghan Persian in many Western sources. As defined in the Constitution of Afghanistan, it is one of the two languages of Afghanistan, the other is Pashto. Dari is the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan and the language of approximately 25–50% of the population. The Iranian and Afghan types of Persian are mutually intelligible, with differences found primarily in the vocabulary, in historical usage, Dari refers to the Middle Persian court language of the Sassanids. Dari is a given to the New Persian language since the 10th century, widely used in Arabic. Since 1964, it has been the name in Afghanistan for the Persian spoken there. In Afghanistan, Dari refers to a dialect form of Persian that is the standard language used in administration, government, radio, television. Because of a preponderance of Dari native speakers, who refer to the language as Fārsi. There are different opinions about the origin of the word Dari, the majority of scholars believes that Dari refers to the Persian word dar or darbār, meaning Court, as it was the formal language of the Sassanids. The original meaning of the word dari is given in a notice attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, according to him, Pārsī was the language spoken by priests, scholars, and the like, it is the language of Fars. It is obvious that this refers to the Middle Persian. As for Dari, he says, it is the language of the cities of Madāen, is connected with presence at court. Among the languages of the people of Khorasan and the east, in general, Iranian languages are known from three periods, usually referred to as Old, Middle, and New periods. But it is thought that the first person in Europe to use the term Deri for Dari was Thomas Hyde, at Oxford, in his chief work, ferghana, Samarkand, and Bukhara were starting to be linguistically Darified in originally Khorezmian and Soghdian areas during Samanid rule. Dari Persian spread around the Oxus River region, Afghanistan, and Khorasan after the Arab conquests, the replacement of the Pahlavi script with the Arabic script in order to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirids in 9th century Khorasan. Persian was rooted into Central Asia by the Samanids, the role of lingua franca that Sogdian originally played was succeeded by Persian after the arrival of Islam
7.
Georgian language
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Georgian is a Kartvelian language spoken by Georgians. It is the language of Georgia. Georgian is written in its own writing system, the Georgian script, Georgian is the literary language for all regional subgroups of Georgians, including those who speak other Kartvelian languages, Svans, Mingrelians and the Laz. Georgian is the most pervasive of the Kartvelian languages, a family that also includes Svan and Megrelian and Laz. Dialects of Georgian are from Imereti, Racha-Lechkhumi, Guria, Adjara, Imerkhevi, Kartli, Kakheti, Saingilo, Tusheti, Khevsureti, Khevi, Pshavi, Fereydan, Mtiuleti and Meskheti. Georgian as separate from the other Kartvelian languages would have emerged in the 1st millennium BC in the area known later as the Kingdom of Iberia, the evolution of Georgian into a written language was a consequence of the conversion of the Georgian elite to Christianity in the mid-4th century. The first Georgian texts are inscriptions and palimpsests dating to the 5th century, Georgian has a rich literary tradition. The oldest surviving work in Georgian is the 5th century Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik by Iakob Tsurtaveli. In the 11th century, Old Georgian gives rise to Middle Georgian, the Georgian national epic, Shota Rustavelis The Knight in the Panthers Skin, dates from the 12th century. This marked the beginning of the modern Georgian language, symbols on the left are those of the IPA and those on the right are of the modern Georgian alphabet. Opinions also differ on the aspiration of /t͡sʰ, t͡ʃʰ/, as it is non-contrastive, a former distinction between /x/ and /qʰ/ has been lost. Prosody in Georgian involves stress, intonation, and rhythm, stress is very weak, and linguists disagree as to where stress occurs in words. Jun, Vicenik, and Lofstedt have proposed that Georgian stress and intonation are the result of pitch accents on the first syllable of a word, the rhythm of Georgian speech is syllable-timed. Georgian contains many harmonic clusters involving two consonants of a type which are pronounced with only a single release, e. g. ბგერა bgera, ცხოვრება tskhovreba. There are also frequent consonant clusters, sometimes involving more than six consonants in a row, as may be seen in words like გვფრცქვნი gvprtskvni and მწვრთნელი mtsvrtneli. Vicenik has observed that Georgian vowels following ejective stops have creaky voice, Georgian has been written in a variety of scripts over its history. Currently the Mkhedruli or Military script is almost completely dominant, the others are used mostly in religious documents, Mkhedruli has 33 letters in common use, a half dozen more are obsolete in Georgian, though still used in other alphabets, like Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan. The letters of Mkhedruli correspond closely to the phonemes of the Georgian language, however, the first examples of a Georgian script date from the 5th century AD
8.
Gujarati language
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Gujarati /ɡʊdʒəˈrɑːti/ is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Indian state of Gujarat. It is part of the greater Indo-European language family, Gujarati is descended from Old Gujarati. In India, it is the language in the state of Gujarat, as well as an official language in the union territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra. Gujarati is the language of the Gujjars, who had ruled Rajputana, according to the Central Intelligence Agency,4. 5% of the Indian population speaks Gujarati, which amounts to 54.6 million speakers in India. There are about 65.5 million speakers of Gujarati worldwide, Gujarati was the first language of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Gujarati is a modern IA language evolved from Sanskrit, Central, in Gujarati/Rajasthani, Western Hindi, and Punjabi/Lahanda/Sindhi, on the basis of innovation of auxiliary verbs and postpositions in Gujarati/Rajasthani. Gujarati/Rajasthani into Gujarati and Rajasthani through development of such characteristics as auxiliary ch-, grammatically, a new plural marker of -o developed. In literature, the quarter of the 19th century saw a series of milestones for Gujarati. The printing was introduced in Gujarati in 1812, the first printed book published was the Gujarati translation of Dabestan-e Mazaheb prepared and printed by Parsi priest Fardunjee Marzban in 1815. 1822, first Gujarati newspaper, Mumbai Samachar, the oldest newspaper in India still in circulation, 1840s, personal diary composition, Nityanondh, Durgaram Mehta. 1845, first modern Gujarati poem, Bapani Piparu, Dalpatram 1851, first essay, Mandaḷī Maḷvāthi Thātā Lābh, Narmadashankar Dave 1866, first original novel, Karaṇ Ghelo, Nandshankar Mehta. 1866, first social novel, Sasu Vahu ni Ladai, Mahipatram Rupram Nilkanth 1866, first autobiography, Mārī Hakīkat,1900, first original short story, Shantidas, Ambalal Desai. Of the approximately 46 million speakers of Gujarati in 1997, roughly 45, however, Gujarati community leaders in Pakistan claim that there are 3 million Gujarati speakers in Karachi. There is an amount of Mauritian population and a large amount of Réunion Island people who are from Gujarati descent among which some of them still speak Gujarati. According to the 2011 census, Gujarati is the seventeenth most spoken language in the Greater Toronto Area, most, with British passports, settled in the UK. Gujarati is offered as a GCSE subject for students in the UK, a distribution of the geographical area can be found in Linguistic Survey of India by George A. Grierson. Gujarati is one of the recognized constitutional languages and fourteen regional languages of India. It is officially recognized in the state of Gujarat, India, in A simplified grammar of the Gujarati language by William Tisdall, two major dialects of Gujarati are mentioned, a standard Hindu dialect and a Parsi dialect
9.
Kazakh language
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Kazakh belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages. It is closely related to Nogai, Kyrgyz, and especially Karakalpak, Kazakh is also spoken by many ethnic Kazakhs through the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Germany. Like other Turkic languages, Kazakh is a language. The Kazakh language has its speakers spread over a vast territory from the Tian Shan to the shore of Caspian Sea. Kazakh is the state language of Kazakhstan, in which nearly 10 million speakers are reported to live. In China, more than one million ethnic Kazakhs and Kazakh speakers reside in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang. Today, Kazakh is written in Cyrillic in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, the oldest known written records of languages closely related to Kazakh were written in the Old Turkic alphabet. However, it is not believed any of these varieties were direct predecessors of Kazakh. Modern Kazakh has historically been written using versions of the Latin, in October 2006, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the President of Kazakhstan, brought up the topic of using the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet as the official script for Kazakh in Kazakhstan. A Kazakh government study released in September 2007 said that Kazakhstan could feasibly switch to a Latin script over a 10- to 12-year period, the transition was halted temporarily on December 13,2007, with President Nazarbayev declaring, “For 70 years the Kazakhstanis read and wrote in Cyrillic. More than 100 nationalities live in our state, thus we need stability and peace. We should be in no hurry in the issue of alphabet transformation”, Kazakh exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony, with some words of recent foreign origin as exceptions. There is also a system of rounding harmony which resembles that of Kyrgyz, the following chart depicts the consonant inventory of standard Kazakh, many of the sounds, however, are allophones of other sounds or appear only in recent loan-words. The 18 consonant phonemes listed by Vajda are in bold—since these are phonemes, their place and manner of articulation are very general. The borrowed phonemes /f/, /v/, /ɕ/, /t͡ɕ/ and /x/, only occur in recent mostly Russian borrowings, in the table, the elements left of a divide are voiceless, while those to the right are voiced. Kazakh has a system of nine phonemic vowels, three of which are diphthongs, the rounding contrast and /æ/ generally only occur as phonemes in the first syllable of a word, but do occur later allophonically, see the section on harmony below for more information. According to Vajda, the quality of vowels is actually one of neutral versus retracted tongue root. Per convention, rounded vowels are presented to the right of their unrounded counterparts, phonetic values are paired with the corresponding character in Kazakhs Cyrillic alphabet
10.
Kurdish language
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Kurdish is a continuum of Northwestern Iranian languages spoken by the Kurds in Western Asia. Kurdish forms three dialect groups known as Northern Kurdish, Central Kurdish, and Southern Kurdish, a separate group of non-Kurdish Northwestern Iranian languages, the Zaza–Gorani languages, are also spoken by several million Kurds. Recent studies estimate between 8 to 20 million native Kurdish speakers in Turkey, the majority of the Kurds speak Northern Kurdish. The literary output in Kurdish was mostly confined to poetry until the early 20th century, today, there are two principal written Kurdish dialects, namely Northern Kurdish in the northern parts of the geographical region of Kurdistan and Central Kurdish further east and south. Central Kurdish is, along with Arabic, one of the two languages of Iraq and is in political documents simply referred to as Kurdish. The Kurdish languages belong to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family and they are generally classified as Northwestern Iranian languages, or by some scholars as intermediate between Northwestern and Southwestern Iranian. Martin van Bruinessen notes that Kurdish has a strong south-western Iranian element, whereas Zaza, windfuhr identified Kurdish dialects as Parthian, albeit with a Median substratum. The most argued hypothesis on the localisation of the territory of the Kurds remains D. N. Mackenzies theory. He has tried to reconstruct the alleged Persian-Kurdish-Baluchi linguistic unity presumably in the parts of Iran. Kurdish is divided into three groups, where dialects from different groups are not mutually intelligible without acquired bilingualism, Northern Kurdish is the largest dialect group, spoken by an estimated 15 to 20 million Kurds in Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq and northwestern Iran. Central Kurdish is spoken by an estimated 6 to 7 million Kurds in much of Iraqi Kurdistan, Sorani is a written standard of Central Kurdish developed in the 1920s and was later adopted as the standard orthography of Kurdish as an official language of Iraq. Southern Kurdish is spoken by about 3 million Kurds in Kermanshah and Ilam provinces of Iran, in historical evolution terms, Kurmanji is less modified than Sorani and Pehlewani in both phonetic and morphological structure. The Kermanshahi group has influenced by among other things its closer cultural proximity to Persian. Philip G. Kreyenbroek, a writing in 1992, says. Sorani is normally written in a form of the Arabic script. Reasons for describing Kurmanji and Sorani as dialects of one language are their common origin, for example, Sorani has neither gender nor case-endings, whereas Kurmanji has both. Differences in vocabulary and pronunciation are not as great as between German and English, but they are still considerable, according to Encyclopaedia of Islam, although Kurdish is not a unified language, its many dialects are interrelated and at the same time distinguishable from other Western Iranian languages. The same source classifies different Kurdish dialects as two groups, northern and central
11.
Lezgian language
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Lezgian /ˈlɛzɡiən/, also called Lezgi or Lezgin, is a language that belongs to the Lezgic languages. It is spoken by the Lezgins, who live in southern Dagestan, Lezgian is a literary language and an official language of Dagestan. It is classified as vulnerable by UNESCOs Atlas of the Worlds Languages in Danger, Lezgian is also spoken in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan by immigrants from Azerbaijan and Daghestan. There are also populations in the Balikesir and Yalova regions in Turkey. The Lezgian people are concentrated mainly in Kirne village of the Balikesir region, the total number of speakers is about 800,000. There are nine languages in the Lezgic language family, namely, Lezgian, Tabasaran, Rutul, Aghul, Tsakhur, Budukh, Kryts, Udi and these languages have the same names as their ethnic groups. Some of its dialects are considered different from the standard form. /a/ has two allophones, and, the former prevails in closed syllables, the latter in open syllables. /a/ is very often rounded after labialized consonants, which may lose their labialization. /e/ is open in stressed syllables if a vowel plus /n/ sequence is not followed by a vowel, the /n/ may be deleted, there are 54 consonants in Lezgian. Characters to the right are the letters of the Lezgian Cyrillic Alphabet, note that aspiration is not normally indicated in the orthography, despite the fact that it is phonemic. Lezgian has been written in different alphabets over the course of its history. These alphabets have been based on three scripts, Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic, the Lezgian Cyrillic alphabet is as follows, The Latin alphabet was as follows, Lezgian is unusual for a Northeast Caucasian language in not having noun classes. Standard Lezgian grammar features 18 grammatical cases, produced by agglutinating suffixes, the four grammatical cases are, Absolutive case, marks the subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object of a transitive sentence. It is also used to mark a nominal predicate and as a vocative, ergative case, marks the subject of transitive verbs, and the subject of some compound intransitive verbs. It is also used with the meaning of, the genitive case precedes the noun that it modifies. Dative case, usually marks the object of sentences, that is the recipient of an action. It is also used to mark the subject of verbs and to express a point of time
12.
Ossetian language
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Ossetian, also known as Ossete and Ossetic, is an Eastern Iranian language spoken in Ossetia, a region on the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains. It is a descendant of the Scythian, Sarmatian and Alanic languages. Ossetian speakers number about 577,450, with 451,000 speakers in the Russian Federation recorded in the 2010 census, Ossetian belongs to the Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages. Within Iranian it is placed in an Eastern subgroup and further to a Northeastern sub-subgroup, the other Eastern Iranian languages such as Pashto and Yaghnobi show certain commonalities but also deep-reaching divergences from Ossetic. From deep Antiquity, the languages of the Iranian group were distributed in a vast territory including present-day Iran, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Ossetian is the sole survivor of the branch of Iranian languages known as Scythian. The Scythian group included numerous tribes, known in ancient sources as the Scythians, Massagetae, Saka, the more easterly Khorezmians and the Sogdians were also closely affiliated, in linguistic terms. Ossetian, together with Kurdish, Tati and Talyshi, is one of the main Iranian languages with a community of speakers in the Caucasus. It is descended from Alanic, the language of the Alans and it is believed to be the only surviving descendant of a Sarmatian language. The closest genetically related language may be the Yaghnobi language of Tajikistan, the names of ancient Iranian tribes in fact reflect this pluralization, e. g. Saromatae and Masagetae. The earliest known sample of Ossetian is an inscription which dates from the 10th to 12th centuries and was found near the River Bolshoi Zelenchuk at Arkhyz. The text is written in the Greek alphabet, with special digraphs, the scholarly transliteration of the Alanic phrases is, dæ ban xʷærz, mæ sfili, xsinjæ kurθi kændæ and du farnitz, kintzæ mæ sfili, kajci fæ wa sawgin. Equivalents in modern Ossetian would be Dæ bon xwarz, me’fšini ‘xšinæ, kurdigæj dæ. and farm neč, the passage translates as, The Alans I greet in their language, Good day to you my lords lady, where are you from. Good day to you my lords lady, where are you from, and other things, When an Alan woman takes a priest as a lover, you might hear this, Arent you ashamed, my lordly lady, that your cunt is being fucked by a priest. Arent you ashamed, my lady, to have an affair with the priest. Marginalia of Greek religious books, with parts of the book translated into Old Ossetic, have been recently found. Heavy-stem nouns possessed a long vowel or diphthong, and were stressed on the first-occurring syllable of this type. This is precisely the situation observed in the earliest records of Ossetian presented above and this situation also obtains in Modern Ossetian, although the emphasis in Digor is also affected by the openness of the vowel. The trend is found in a glossary of the Jassic dialect dating from 1422
13.
Pashto language
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Pashto, known in Persian literature as Afghānistani and in Urdu and Hindi literature as Paṭhānī, is the South-Central Asian language of the Pashtuns. Its speakers are called Pashtuns or Pukhtuns and sometimes Afghans or Pathans and it is an Eastern Iranian language, belonging to the Indo-European family. Pashto is one of the two languages of Afghanistan, and it is the second-largest regional language of Pakistan, mainly spoken in the west and northwest of the country. Pakistans Federally Administered Tribal Areas are almost 100% Pashto-speaking, while it is the majority language of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pashto is the main language among the Pashtun diaspora around the world. The total number of Pashto-speakers is estimated to be 45–60 million people worldwide, Pashto belongs to the Northeastern Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch, but Ethnologue lists it as Southeastern Iranian. Pashto has two main groups, “soft” and “hard”, the latter known as Pakhto. As a national language of Afghanistan, Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south, and southwest, the exact numbers of speakers are unavailable, but different estimates show that Pashto is the mother tongue of 45–60% of the total population of Afghanistan. In Pakistan Pashto is spoken as a first language by about 15. 42% of Pakistans 170 million people and it is the main language of the Pashtun-majority regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas and northern Balochistan. It is also spoken in parts of Mianwali and Attock districts of the Punjab province and in Islamabad, modern Pashto-speaking communities are found in the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad in Sindh. Other communities of Pashto speakers are found in Tajikistan, and further in the Pashtun diaspora, there are also communities of Pashtun descent in the southwestern part of Jammu and Kashmir. Pashto is one of the two languages of Afghanistan, along with Dari. Since the early 18th century, all the kings of Afghanistan were ethnic Pashtuns except for Habibullah Kalakani, Persian as the literary language of the royal court was more widely used in government institutions while Pashto was spoken by the Pashtun tribes as their native tongue. Although officially strengthening the use of Pashto, the Afghan elite regarded Persian as a “sophisticated language, king Zahir Shah thus followed suit after his father Nadir Khan had decreed in 1933, that both Persian and Pashto were to be studied and utilized by officials. Thus Pashto became a language, a symbol for Afghan nationalism. The status of language was reaffirmed in 1964 by the constitutional assembly when Afghan Persian was officially renamed to Dari. The lyrics of the anthem of Afghanistan are in Pashto. In Pakistan, Urdu and English are the two official languages, Pashto has no official status at the federal level. On a provincial level, Pashto is the language of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas
14.
Tabasaran language
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Tabasaran is a Northeast Caucasian language of the Lezgic branch. It is spoken by the Tabasaran people in part of the Russian Republic of Dagestan. There are two dialects, North and South Tabasaran. It has a language based on the Southern dialect, one of the official languages of Dagestan. The verb system is simple, verbs agree with the subject in number, person. North Tabasaran has two classes, whereas Southern Tabasaran has none. It is spoken in the basin of Upper Rubas-nir and Upper Chirakh-nir, note, The letters indicated in orange are encountered only in loanwords from Russian. Tabasaran is very probably a language of the fluid-S type. It is reported to have 53 noun cases but see Comrie, uwu aldakurawu Уву алдакураву — You are falling. Uzuz uwu kkunduzuz Узуз уву ккундузуз — I love you, zakur ʕürza Закур гъюрза — Ill come tomorrow Uzu kana qheza Узу кана хъэза — Ill be back Chanmagomedov, B. G. -K
15.
Tajik language
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Tajik or Tajiki is the variety of Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is closely related to Dari Persian, since the beginning of the twentieth century, Tajik has been considered by a number of writers and researchers to be a variety of Persian. The issue of whether Tajik and Persian are to be considered two dialects of a language or two discrete languages has political sides to it. Today Tajik is recognized as a West-Iranian language, Tajik is the official language of Tajikistan. In Afghanistan, this language is influenced by Turkic languages, is called Dari. The standard language is based on the dialects of Tajik. The most important cities of Central Asia—Samarkand and Bukhara—are in present-day Uzbekistan, today, virtually all Tajik speakers in Bukhara are bilingual in Tajik and Uzbek. This Tajik–Uzbek bilingualism has had a influence on the phonology, morphology. Tajiks are also found in numbers in the Surxondaryo Region in the south. Tajik is still spoken in Samarqand and Buxoro today, as Tajiks account for perhaps 70% of the total population of Samarqand and have been estimated to make up as much as 90% of Buxoro. Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community comprises 5% of the total population. However, these numbers do not include ethnic Tajiks who, for a variety of reasons, the Uzbekization movement ended in 1924. Native Tajiks living in the nation of Uzbekistan have reportedly estimated that Tajiks make up 25–30% of the nations population, Tajiks constitute 80% of Tajikistans population, and Persian dominates in most parts of the country. Some Tajiks in Badakhshan in southeastern Tajikistan, where the Pamir languages are the languages of most residents, are bilingual. Tajiks constitute between 25% and 30% of the population of the country. 50% of Afghan citizens are native speakers of Dari, a large Tajik-speaking diaspora exists due to the instability that has plagued Central Asia in recent years, with significant numbers of Tajiks found in Russia, Kazakhstan, and beyond. This Tajik diaspora is also the result of the state of the economy of Tajikistan. Tajik dialects can be split into the following groups, Northern dialects
16.
Tatar language
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The Tatar language is a Turkic language spoken by Volga Tatars mainly located in modern Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. It should not be confused with the Crimean Tatar language, to which it is remotely related, there are more than 7 million speakers of Tatar in the world. Tatar is also native for several thousand Maris, mordvas Qaratay group also speak a variant of Kazan Tatar. In the 2010 census, 69% of Russian Tatars who responded to the question about language ability claimed a knowledge of the Tatar language, in Tatarstan, 93% of Tatars and 3, 6% of Russians did so. In neighbouring Bashkortostan, 67% of Tatars, 27% of Bashkirs, Tatar, along with Russian, is the official language of the Republic of Tatarstan. The official script of Tatar language is based on the Cyrillic script with some additional letters, the Republic of Tatarstan passed a law in 1999, which came into force in 2001, establishing an official Tatar Latin alphabet. A Russian federal law overrode it in 2002, making Cyrillic the sole official script in Tatarstan since, unofficially, other scripts are used as well, mostly Latin and Arabic. All official sources in Tatarstan must use Cyrillic on their websites, in other cases, where Tatar has no official status, the use of a specific alphabet depends on the preference of the author. The Tatar language was made a de facto official language in Russia in 1917, Tatar is also considered to have been the official language in the short-lived Idel-Ural State, briefly formed during the Russian Civil War. One should note, however, that Bolshevist Russia did not recognize official languages as such, however, in the Soviet era, Tatar was such a language in Bashkortostan, Mari El and other regions of the Russian SFSR. The usage of Tatar declined from the 1930s onwards, in the 1980s, the study and teaching of Tatar in the public education system was limited to rural schools. However, Tatar-speaking pupils had little chance of entering university because higher education was available in Russian almost exclusively, as of 2001 Tatar was considered a potentially endangered language while Siberian and Crimean Tatar languages received endangered and seriously endangered statuses, respectively. Higher education in Tatar can only be found in Tatarstan, and is restricted to the humanities, in other regions Tatar is primarily a spoken language and the number of speakers as well as their proficiency tends to decrease. Tatar is popular as a language only in Tatar-speaking areas where schools with Tatar language lessons are situated. On the other hand, Tatar is the language in use in rural districts of Tatarstan. There are three dialects of Tatar, Western, Middle, and Eastern. All of these also have subdivisions. In the Western dialect Ç is pronounced and as, there are no differences between v and w, q and k, g and ğ in the Mişär dialect
17.
Turkish language
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Outside of Turkey, significant smaller groups of speakers exist in Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Cyprus, Greece, the Caucasus, and other parts of Europe and Central Asia. Cyprus has requested that the European Union add Turkish as an official EU language, in 1928, as one of Atatürks Reforms in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with a Latin alphabet. The distinctive characteristics of Turkish are vowel harmony and extensive agglutination, the basic word order of Turkish is subject–object–verb. Turkish has no classes or grammatical gender. Turkish has a strong T–V distinction and usage of honorifics, Turkish uses second-person pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, age, courtesy or familiarity toward the addressee. The plural second-person pronoun and verb forms are used referring to a person out of respect. Turkic languages belong to the Altaic language group, the Turkic family comprises some 30 living languages spoken across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia. Turkish is a member of the Oghuz group of languages, a subgroup of the Turkic language family, there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and the other Oghuz Turkic languages, including Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish. The earliest known Old Turkic inscriptions are the three monumental Orkhon inscriptions found in modern Mongolia, erected in honour of the prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khagan, these date back to the second Turk Kaghanate. The Seljuqs of the Oghuz Turks, in particular, brought their language, following the adoption of Islam c. Turkish literature during the Ottoman period, particularly Divan poetry, was influenced by Persian, including the adoption of poetic meters. One of the tasks of the newly established association was to initiate a reform to replace loanwords of Arabic. By banning the usage of imported words in the press, the association succeeded in removing several hundred words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by the TDK were newly derived from Turkic roots, owing to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in their vocabularies. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the terms of Arabic or Persian origin. The past few decades have seen the work of the TDK to coin new Turkish words to express new concepts and technologies as they enter the language. Many of these new words, particularly information technology terms, have received widespread acceptance, however, the TDK is occasionally criticized for coining words which sound contrived and artificial. Some earlier changes—such as bölem to replace fırka, political party—also failed to meet with popular approval, some words restored from Old Turkic have taken on specialized meanings, for example betik is now used to mean script in computer science
18.
Turkmen language
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Turkmen has vowel harmony, is agglutinative, and has no grammatical gender. Written Turkmen today is based on the Teke dialect, the other dialects are Nohurly, Ýomud, Änewli, Hasarly, Nerezim, Gökleň, Salyr, Saryk, Ärsary and Çowdur. The Teke dialect is referred to as Chagatai, but like all Turkmen dialects it reflects only a limited influence from classical Chagatai. Officially, Turkmen is rendered in the “Täze Elipbiý”, or “New Alphabet”, however, the old Soviet Cyrillic alphabet is still in wide use. Before 1929, Turkmen was written in an Arabic alphabet, in 1929–1938 a Latin alphabet replaced it, and then the Cyrillic alphabet was used from 1938 to 1991. In 1991, the current Latin alphabet was introduced, although the transition to it has been rather slow and it used to use some unusual letters, such as the pound, dollar, yen, and cent signs, but these were replaced by more conventional letter symbols. The following phonemes are present in the Turkmen language, Turkmen contains both short and long vowels, doubling the duration of sound for a short vowel is generally how its long vowel counterpart is pronounced. Turkmen employs vowel harmony, a principle that is common in fellow Turkic languages, vowels and their sounds are as follows, For purposes of vowel harmony the central vowel is considered back. Turkmen consonant phonemes, Note that с and з are actually used for and, not, like other Turkic languages, Turkmen is characterized by vowel harmony. In general, words of native origin consist either entirely of front vowels or entirely of back vowels, prefixes and suffixes reflect this harmony, taking different forms depending on the word to which they are attached. The infinitive form of a verb determines whether it will follow a front vowel harmony or back vowel harmony, words of foreign origin, mainly Russian, Persian, or Arabic, do not follow vowel harmony. Verbs are conjugated for singular and plural number and first, second, There are 11 verb tenses, present comprehensive, present perfect, future certain, future indefinite, conditional, past definite, obligatory, imperative, and intentional. There are two types of verbs in Turkmen, distinguished by their forms, those ending in the suffix -mak. -Mak verbs follow back vowel harmony, whereas -mek verbs follow front vowel harmony, evidentiality is determined by four markers, roughly, -dY -Yp-dYr -dYr-mY-näm -mYş Some independent particles may be said to convey evidentiality, one such word is the particle eken. Aman become sick-EV-COP Aman is sick, compare 1 with 2. a and 2. b,2. a. Maral Ashgabat-ABL come-EV-COP Maral came from Ashgabat, Ben you-GEN cookie-pl-2sPOSS-ACC eat-3spast Ben ate your cookies. The speaker saw Ben eat the cookies, Ben told the speaker that he ate the cookies. Ben you-GEN cookie-pl-2sPOSS-ACC eat-EV-COP Ben ate your cookies, the speaker heard from someone else that Ben ate the cookies
19.
Urdu language
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Urdu is a persianized standard register of the Hindustani language. It is the language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also one of the 22 official languages recognized in the Constitution of India, hyderabad, Rampur, Bhopal and Lucknow are noted Urdu-speaking cities of India. Urdu is historically associated with the Muslims of the northern Indian subcontinent, apart from specialized vocabulary, Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi, another recognized register of Hindustani. Urdu, like Hindi, is a form of Hindustani, Urdu developed under the influence of the Persian and Arabic languages, both of which have contributed a significant amount of vocabulary to formal speech. Around 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit, Urdu words originating from Chagatai and Arabic were borrowed through Persian and hence are Persianized versions of the original words. For instance, the Arabic ta marbuta changes to he or te, nevertheless, contrary to popular belief, Urdu did not borrow from the Turkish language, but from Chagatai. Urdu and Turkish borrowed from Arabic and Persian, hence the similarity in pronunciation of many Urdu, Arabic influence in the region began with the late first-millennium Arab invasion of India in the 7th century. The Persian language was introduced into the subcontinent a few centuries later by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties including that of the Delhi Sultanate. With the advent of the British Raj, Persian was no longer the language of administration but Hindustani, still written in the Persian script, the name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century Urdu was commonly known as Hindi, the language was also known by various other names such as Hindavi and Dehlavi. The communal nature of the language lasted until it replaced Persian as the language in 1837 and was made co-official. Urdu was promoted in British India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian and this triggered a Brahman backlash in northwestern India, which argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script. At independence, Pakistan established a highly Persianized literary form of Urdu as its national language, English has exerted a heavy influence on both as a co-official language. Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localized wherever it is spoken, similarly, the Urdu spoken in India can also be distinguished into many dialects like Dakhni of South India, and Khariboli of the Punjab region since recent times. Because of Urdus similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can understand one another if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. The syntax, morphology, and the vocabulary are essentially identical. Thus linguists usually count them as one language and contend that they are considered as two different languages for socio-political reasons
20.
Uyghur language
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Significant communities of Uyghur-speakers are located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and various other countries have Uyghur-speaking expatriate communities. Uyghur belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family, like many other Turkic languages, Uyghur displays vowel harmony and agglutination, lacks noun classes or grammatical gender, and is a left-branching language with subject–object–verb word order. More distinctly Uyghur processes include, especially in dialects, vowel reduction. In addition to influence of other Turkic languages, Uyghur has historically been influenced strongly by Persian and Arabic, the modified Arabic-derived writing system is the most common and the only standard in China, although other writing systems are used for auxiliary and historical purposes. Unlike most Arabic-derived scripts, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet has mandatory marking of all due to modifications to the original Perso-Arabic script made in the 20th century. Two Latin and one Cyrillic alphabet are used, though to a much lesser extent. The Arabic and Latin alphabets both have 32 characters, the Middle Turkic languages are the direct ancestor of the Karluk languages, including Uyghur and the Uzbek language. Kagan Arik wrote that Modern Uyghur is not descended from Old Uyghur, rather, according to Gerard Clauson, Western Yugur is considered to be the true descendant of Old Uyghur, and is also called Neo-Uyghur. Modern Uyghur is not a descendant of Old Uyghur, but is descended from the Xākānī language described by Mahmud al-Kashgari in Dīwānu l-Luġat al-Turk, the Western Yugur language, although in geographic proximity, is more closely related to the Siberian Turkic languages in Siberia. Robert Dankoff wrote that the Turkic language spoken in Kashgar and used in Kara Khanid works was Karluk, robert Barkley Shaw wrote, In the Turkish of Káshghar and Yarkand. This would seem in many case to be a misnomer as applied to the language of Kashghar. Other Kara-Khanid writers wrote works in the Turki Karluk Khaqani language, yusuf Khass Hajib wrote the Kutadgu Bilig. Ahmad bin Mahmud Yukenaki wrote the Hibat al-ḥaqāyiq, after Chaghatai fell into extinction, the standard versions of Uyghur and Uzbek were developed from dialects in the Chagatai-speaking region, showing abundant Chaghatai influence. Uyghur language today shows considerable Persian influence as a result from Chagatai, Modern Uyghur religious literature includes the Taẕkirah, biographies of Islamic religious figures and saints. The Taẕkirah is a genre of literature written about Sufi Muslim saints in Altishahr, the shrines of Sufi Saints are revered in Altishahr as one of Islams essential components and the tazkirah literature reinforced the sacredness of the shrines. Anyone who does not believe in the stories of the saints is guaranteed hellfire by the tazkirahs and it is written, And those who doubt Their Holinesses the Imams will leave this world without faith, and on Judgement Day their faces will be black. In the Tazkirah of the Four Sacrificed Imams, Shaw translated extracts from the Tazkiratul-Bughra on the Muslim Turki war against the infidel Khotan. The Turki-language Tadhkirah i Khwajagan was written by M. Sadiq Kashghari, historical works like the Tārīkh-i amniyya and Tārīkh-i ḥamīdi were written by Musa Sayrami
21.
Uzbek language
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Uzbek is a Turkic language and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has 27 million native speakers and is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan, Uzbek belongs to the Eastern Turkic, or Karluk, branch of the Turkic language family. External influences include Persian, Arabic and Russian, one of the most noticeable distinctions of Uzbek from other Turkic languages is the rounding of the vowel /a/ to /ɒ/ or /ɔ/, a feature that was influenced by Persian. In the language itself, Uzbek is oʻzbek tili or oʻzbekcha, in Cyrillic, the same names are written ўзбек тили and ўзбекча, in Arabic script, ازبېک تیلی and ازبېجه. The first Turkic dynasty in the region was that of the Kara-Khanid Khanate in the 9th–12th centuries, the language was championed by Ali-Shir Navai in the 15th and 16th centuries. Navai was the greatest representative of Chagatai language literature and he significantly contributed to the development of the Chagatay language and its direct descendant Uzbek and is widely considered to be the founder of Uzbek literature. Ultimately based on the Karluk variant of the Turkic languages, Chagatay contained large numbers of Persian, by the 19th century it was rarely used for literary composition, but disappeared only in the early 20th century. The term Uzbek as applied to language has meant different things at different times, all three dialects continue to exist within modern spoken Uzbek. Edward A. Allworth argued that this badly distorted the history of the region and was used to give authors such as the 15th century author Ali-Shir Navai an Uzbek identity. Estimates of the number of speakers of Uzbek vary widely, the Swedish encyclopedia Nationalencyklopedin estimates the number of native speakers to be 26 million, and the CIA World Factbook estimates 25 million. The influence of Islam, and by extension, Arabic, is evident in Uzbek loanwords, there is also a residual influence of Russian, from the time when Uzbeks were under the rule of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Uzbek vocabulary has also heavily influenced by Persian through its historic roots. The Uzbek language has many dialects, varying widely from region to region, however, there is a commonly understood dialect which is used in mass media and in most printed materials. Among the most-widespread dialects are the Tashkent dialect, Afghan dialect, the Ferghana dialect, the Khorezm dialect, the Chimkent-Turkestan dialect, 1928–1940, the Latin-based Yañalif used officially. 1940–1992, the Cyrillic script used officially, since 1992, Yañalif is official in Uzbekistan, although the Cyrillic script is still widely used. Despite the official status of the Latin script in Uzbekistan, the use of Cyrillic is still widespread, especially in advertisements, in newspapers, scripts may be mixed, with headlines in Latin and articles in Cyrillic. The Arabic script is no longer used in Uzbekistan except symbolically in limited texts or for the studies of Chagatai. In the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where there is an Uzbek minority, however, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet is sometimes used
22.
Iran
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Iran, also known as Persia, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a sovereign state in Western Asia. Comprising a land area of 1,648,195 km2, it is the second-largest country in the Middle East, with 82.8 million inhabitants, Iran is the worlds 17th-most-populous country. It is the country with both a Caspian Sea and an Indian Ocean coastline. The countrys central location in Eurasia and Western Asia, and its proximity to the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran is the countrys capital and largest city, as well as its leading economic and cultural center. Iran is the site of to one of the worlds oldest civilizations, the area was first unified by the Iranian Medes in 625 BC, who became the dominant cultural and political power in the region. The empire collapsed in 330 BC following the conquests of Alexander the Great, under the Sassanid Dynasty, Iran again became one of the leading powers in the world for the next four centuries. Beginning in 633 AD, Arabs conquered Iran and largely displaced the indigenous faiths of Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism by Islam, Iran became a major contributor to the Islamic Golden Age that followed, producing many influential scientists, scholars, artists, and thinkers. During the 18th century, Iran reached its greatest territorial extent since the Sassanid Empire, through the late 18th and 19th centuries, a series of conflicts with Russia led to significant territorial losses and the erosion of sovereignty. Popular unrest culminated in the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which established a monarchy and the countrys first legislative body. Following a coup instigated by the U. K. Growing dissent against foreign influence and political repression led to the 1979 Revolution, Irans rich cultural legacy is reflected in part by its 21 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the third-largest number in Asia and 11th-largest in the world. Iran is a member of the UN, ECO, NAM, OIC. Its political system is based on the 1979 Constitution which combines elements of a democracy with a theocracy governed by Islamic jurists under the concept of a Supreme Leadership. A multicultural country comprising numerous ethnic and linguistic groups, most inhabitants are Shia Muslims, the largest ethnic groups in Iran are the Persians, Azeris, Kurds and Lurs. Historically, Iran has been referred to as Persia by the West, due mainly to the writings of Greek historians who called Iran Persis, meaning land of the Persians. As the most extensive interactions the Ancient Greeks had with any outsider was with the Persians, however, Persis was originally referred to a region settled by Persians in the west shore of Lake Urmia, in the 9th century BC. The settlement was then shifted to the end of the Zagros Mountains. In 1935, Reza Shah requested the international community to refer to the country by its native name, opposition to the name change led to the reversal of the decision, and Professor Ehsan Yarshater, editor of Encyclopædia Iranica, propagated a move to use Persia and Iran interchangeably
23.
Afghanistan
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Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located within South Asia and Central Asia. It has a population of approximately 32 million, making it the 42nd most populous country in the world. It is bordered by Pakistan in the south and east, Iran in the west, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan in the north and its territory covers 652,000 km2, making it the 41st largest country in the world. The land also served as the source from which the Kushans, Hephthalites, Samanids, Saffarids, Ghaznavids, Ghorids, Khiljis, Mughals, Hotaks, Durranis, the political history of the modern state of Afghanistan began with the Hotak and Durrani dynasties in the 18th century. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan became a state in the Great Game between British India and the Russian Empire. Following the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, King Amanullah unsuccessfully attempted to modernize the country and it remained peaceful during Zahir Shahs forty years of monarchy. A series of coups in the 1970s was followed by a series of wars that devastated much of Afghanistan. The name Afghānistān is believed to be as old as the ethnonym Afghan, the root name Afghan was used historically in reference to a member of the ethnic Pashtuns, and the suffix -stan means place of in Persian. Therefore, Afghanistan translates to land of the Afghans or, more specifically in a historical sense, however, the modern Constitution of Afghanistan states that he word Afghan shall apply to every citizen of Afghanistan. An important site of historical activities, many believe that Afghanistan compares to Egypt in terms of the historical value of its archaeological sites. The country sits at a unique nexus point where numerous civilizations have interacted and it has been home to various peoples through the ages, among them the ancient Iranian peoples who established the dominant role of Indo-Iranian languages in the region. At multiple points, the land has been incorporated within large regional empires, among them the Achaemenid Empire, the Macedonian Empire, the Indian Maurya Empire, and the Islamic Empire. Archaeological exploration done in the 20th century suggests that the area of Afghanistan has been closely connected by culture and trade with its neighbors to the east, west. Artifacts typical of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze, urban civilization is believed to have begun as early as 3000 BCE, and the early city of Mundigak may have been a colony of the nearby Indus Valley Civilization. More recent findings established that the Indus Valley Civilisation stretched up towards modern-day Afghanistan, making the ancient civilisation today part of Pakistan, Afghanistan, in more detail, it extended from what today is northwest Pakistan to northwest India and northeast Afghanistan. An Indus Valley site has found on the Oxus River at Shortugai in northern Afghanistan. There are several smaller IVC colonies to be found in Afghanistan as well, after 2000 BCE, successive waves of semi-nomadic people from Central Asia began moving south into Afghanistan, among them were many Indo-European-speaking Indo-Iranians. These tribes later migrated further into South Asia, Western Asia, the region at the time was referred to as Ariana
24.
Albania
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Albania, officially the Republic of Albania, is a country in Southeastern Europe. It has a population of 3.03 million as of 2016, Tirana is the nations capital and largest city, followed by Durrës and Vlorë. The country has a coastline on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, the Adriatic Sea to the west. Albania is less than 72 km from Italy, across the Strait of Otranto which connects the Adriatic Sea to the Ionian Sea. In antiquity, the area of Albania was home to several Illyrian, Thracian. After the Illyrian Wars, it part of the Roman provinces of Dalmatia, Macedonia and Moesia Superior. In 1190, the first Albanian state, the Principality of Arbanon was established by archon Progon in the region of Krujë, the territory of Albania was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, of which it remained part of for the next five centuries. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, following the Balkan Wars, the Kingdom of Albania was invaded by Italy in 1939, which formed Greater Albania, before becoming a Nazi German protectorate in 1943. The following year, a socialist Peoples Republic was established under the leadership of Enver Hoxha, Albania experienced widespread social and political transformations in the communist era, as well as isolation from much of the international community. In 1991, the Socialist Republic was dissolved and the Republic of Albania was established, Albania is a democratic and developing country with an upper-middle income economy. The service sector dominates the economy, followed by the industrial. After the fall of communism in Albania, Free-market reforms have opened the country to foreign investment, especially in the development of energy, Albania has a high HDI and provides universal health care system and free primary and secondary education to its citizens. Albania is a member of the United Nations, NATO, WTO, World Bank, the Council of Europe, the OSCE and it is also an official candidate for membership in the European Union. Albania is one of the members of the Energy Community, Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation. It is home to the largest lake in Southern Europe and one of the oldest lakes in Europe, Albania is the Medieval Latin name of the country. The name may have a continuation in the name of a settlement called Albanon and Arbanon. During the Middle Ages, the Albanians called their country Arbëri or Arbëni, Albanians today call their country Shqipëri. As early as the 17th century the placename Shqipëria and the ethnic demonym Shqiptarë gradually replaced Arbëria, the two terms are popularly interpreted as Land of the Eagles and Children of the Eagles
25.
Azerbaijan
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Azerbaijan, officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, is a country in the South Caucasus region, situated at the crossroads of Southwest Asia and Southeastern Europe. It is bound by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west and Iran to the south. The exclave of Nakhchivan is bound by Armenia to the north and east, Iran to the south and west, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic proclaimed its independence in 1918 and became the first democratic state in the Muslim orient world. The country was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1920 as the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, the modern Republic of Azerbaijan proclaimed its independence on 30 August 1991, prior to the official dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. In September 1991, the Armenian majority of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region seceded to form the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, the region and seven adjacent districts outside it became de facto independent with the end of the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1994. These regions are recognized as part of Azerbaijan pending a solution to the status of the Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan is a unitary semi-presidential republic, the country is a member state of the Council of Europe, the OSCE and the NATO Partnership for Peace program. It is one of six independent Turkic states, a member of the Turkic Council. Azerbaijan has diplomatic relations with 158 countries and holds membership in 38 international organizations and it is one of the founding members of GUAM, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Its term of office began on 19 June 2006, Azerbaijan is also a member state of the Non-Aligned Movement, holds observer status in World Trade Organization and is a correspondent at the International Telecommunication Union. The Constitution of Azerbaijan does not declare an official religion and all political forces in the country are secularist. However, the majority of the population are of a Shiite Muslim background, Azerbaijan has a high level of human development which ranks on par with most Eastern European countries. It has a rate of economic development and literacy, as well as a low rate of unemployment. According to the Davos World Economic Forum, Azerbaijans economy has scored 37th place within 138 countries in 2016, Global Competitiveness Index 2015 indicates that Azerbaijan scores highest in its region. ASAN services, established with Presidential Decree, are known for eliminating bribery. ASAN Service has been awarded with United Nations Public Service Award 2015, the ruling party, the New Azerbaijan Party, has been accused of authoritarianism and human rights abuses. The original etymology of name is thought to have its roots in the once-dominant Zoroastrianism. In the Avesta, Frawardin Yasht, there is a mention of âterepâtahe ashaonô fravashîm ýazamaide, the name Atropates itself is the Greek transliteration of an Old Iranian, probably Median, compounded name with the meaning Protected by the Fire or The Land of the Fire
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China
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China, officially the Peoples Republic of China, is a unitary sovereign state in East Asia and the worlds most populous country, with a population of over 1.381 billion. The state is governed by the Communist Party of China and its capital is Beijing, the countrys major urban areas include Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Hong Kong. China is a power and a major regional power within Asia. Chinas landscape is vast and diverse, ranging from forest steppes, the Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from much of South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third and sixth longest in the world, respectively, Chinas coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometers long and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East China and South China seas. China emerged as one of the worlds earliest civilizations in the basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, Chinas political system was based on hereditary monarchies known as dynasties, in 1912, the Republic of China replaced the last dynasty and ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949, when it was defeated by the communist Peoples Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War. The Communist Party established the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949, both the ROC and PRC continue to claim to be the legitimate government of all China, though the latter has more recognition in the world and controls more territory. China had the largest economy in the world for much of the last two years, during which it has seen cycles of prosperity and decline. Since the introduction of reforms in 1978, China has become one of the worlds fastest-growing major economies. As of 2016, it is the worlds second-largest economy by nominal GDP, China is also the worlds largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a nuclear weapons state and has the worlds largest standing army. The PRC is a member of the United Nations, as it replaced the ROC as a permanent member of the U. N. Security Council in 1971. China is also a member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the WTO, APEC, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BCIM, the English name China is first attested in Richard Edens 1555 translation of the 1516 journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa. The demonym, that is, the name for the people, Portuguese China is thought to derive from Persian Chīn, and perhaps ultimately from Sanskrit Cīna. Cīna was first used in early Hindu scripture, including the Mahābhārata, there are, however, other suggestions for the derivation of China. The official name of the state is the Peoples Republic of China. The shorter form is China Zhōngguó, from zhōng and guó and it was then applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and then to Chinas Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state under the Qing
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Tajiks of Xinjiang
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They are Mountain Tajiks, unlike Plain Tajiks in Tajikistan and Afghanistan. They are one of the 56 nationalities officially recognized by the government of China, despite the name by which they are known in China, the Tajiks of Xinjiang are not the same as the Tajik people. The Tajiks in Xinjiang of China, are an extension of the Pamiri people, though most Tajiks in China also speak Persian as well. Tashkurgan Town became the capital of the Sarikol kingdom, a kingdom of the Pamir Mountains, during the Qing dynasty, the Tajiks were administered by a system of Begs like the rest of Xinjiang. The Tajiks of Xinjiang practiced slavery, selling some of their own as a punishment, submissive slaves were given wives and settled with the Tajiks. They were considered property and could be sold anytime and their slaves came from numerous sources, enslaving Sunni captives such as Kirghiz in retaliation for Kirghiz slave raids, or from Kunjud, Gilgit, Chitral. The Tajiks also sold some slaves to Bukhara, the Sunnis called them Rafidites and did not consider them Muslim. Most foreign slaves in Xinjiang were Shia Mountain Tajiks, they were referred to by Sunni Turkic Muslims as Ghalcha, in the 1940s around 9,000 Tajiks lived in Xinjiang. During the Ili Rebellion, Uyghur forces butchered the livestock of the Tajiks as they advanced south, the Soviet backed insurgents destroyed Tajik crops and acted aggressively against the Tajiks and Kirghiz of China. The population of Tajiks in China numbers 41,028 and they are located in Chinas western Xinjiang region with 60% living in Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County. Despite the name Tajik that is used to refer to them, early 20th-century travelers to the region referred to them as Sarikoli, Mountain Tajiks, or Ghalcha. In China, the languages of the Tajik people have no written form. The great majority speak the Sarikoli language, which has heavily influenced by Uyghur, Chinese. A small proportion speak Wakhi language, Sarikoli and Wakhi are Iranian languages, commonly classified in the Pamir or Eastern Iranian areal groups. The Chinese authorities allow a few Ismaili religious buildings to function in Xinjiangs Tajik Autonomous District, but recently, the Aga Khan has begun to communicate with China more. The Aga Khan IV had last visited China in 1981
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Turkic peoples
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The Turkic peoples are a collection of ethnic groups that live in central, eastern, northern, and western Asia as well as parts of eastern Europe. They speak languages belonging to the Turkic language family and they share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits and historical backgrounds. The first known mention of the term Turk applied to a Turkic group was in reference to the Göktürks in the 6th century, a letter by Ishbara Qaghan to Emperor Wen of Sui in 585 described him as the Great Turk Khan. The Orhun inscriptions use the terms Turk and Turuk and this includes Chinese records Spring and Autumn Annals referring to a neighbouring people as Beidi. During the first century CE, Pomponius Mela refers to the Turcae in the north of the Sea of Azov. There are references to certain groups in antiquity whose names could be the form of Türk/Türük such as Togarma, Turukha/Turuška, Turukku. But the information gap is so substantial that we cannot firmly connect these ancient people to the modern Turks, turkologist András Róna-Tas posits that the term Turk could be rooted in the East Iranian Saka language or in Turkic. This etymological concept is related to Old Turkic word stems tür, türi-, törü. The earliest Turkic-speaking peoples identifiable in Chinese sources are the Dingling, Gekun, the Chinese Book of Zhou presents an etymology of the name Turk as derived from helmet, explaining that taken this name refers to the shape of the Altai Mountains. During the Middle Ages, various Turkic peoples of the Eurasian steppe were subsumed under the identity of the Scythians, between 400 CE and the 16th century, Byzantine sources use the name Σκύθαι in reference to twelve different Turkic peoples. However, the usage of the term is based on the linguistic classification in order to avoid any political sense. In short, the term Türki can be used for Türk or vice versa and it is generally agreed that the first Turkic people lived in a region extending from Central Asia to Siberia, with the majority of them living in China historically. Historically they were established after the 6th century BCE, the earliest separate Turkic peoples appeared on the peripheries of the late Xiongnu confederation about 200 BCE. Turkic people may be related to the Xiongnu, Dingling and Tiele people, according to the Book of Wei, the Tiele people were the remnants of the Chidi, the red Di people competing with the Jin in the Spring and Autumn period. Turkic tribes such as the Khazars and Pechenegs probably lived as nomads for many years before establishing the Turkic Khaganate or Göktürk Empire in the 6th century and these were herdsmen and nobles who were searching for new pastures and wealth. The first mention of Turks was in a Chinese text that mentioned trade between Turk tribes and the Sogdians along the Silk Road, the first recorded use of Turk as a political name appears as a 6th-century reference to the word pronounced in Modern Chinese as Tujue. The Ashina clan migrated from Li-jien to the Juan Juan seeking inclusion in their confederacy, the tribe were famed metalsmiths and were granted land near a mountain quarry which looked like a helmet, from which they were said to have gotten their name 突厥. A century later their power had increased such that they conquered the Juan Juan, Turkic peoples originally used their own alphabets, like Orkhon and Yenisey runiforms, and later the Uyghur alphabet
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Georgia (country)
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Georgia is a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. The capital and largest city is Tbilisi, Georgia covers a territory of 69,700 square kilometres, and its 2016 population is about 3.72 million. Georgia is a unitary, semi-presidential republic, with the government elected through a representative democracy, during the classical era, several independent kingdoms became established in what is now Georgia. The kingdoms of Colchis and Iberia adopted Christianity in the early 4th century, a unified Kingdom of Georgia reached the peak of its political and economic strength during the reign of King David IV and Queen Tamar in the 12th and early 13th centuries. Thereafter the kingdom declined and eventually disintegrated under hegemony of various powers, including the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire. Russian rule over Georgia was eventually acknowledged in various treaties with Iran. Since the establishment of the modern Georgian republic in April 1991, post-communist Georgia suffered from civil, the countrys Western orientation soon led to the worsening of relations with Russia, culminating in the brief Russo-Georgian War in August 2008. Georgia is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and it contains two de facto independent regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which gained limited international recognition after the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Georgia and a part of the international community consider the regions to be part of Georgias sovereign territory under Russian military occupation. Georgia probably stems from the Persian designation of the Georgians – gurğān, in the 11th and 12th centuries adapted via Syriac gurz-ān/gurz-iyān, starting with the Persian word gurğ/gurğān, the word was later adopted in numerous other languages, including Slavic and West European languages. This term itself might have established through the ancient Iranian appellation of the near-Caspian region. The self-designation used by ethnic Georgians is Kartvelebi, the medieval Georgian Chronicles present an eponymous ancestor of the Kartvelians, Kartlos, a great-grandson of Japheth. However, scholars agree that the word is derived from the Karts, the name Sakartvelo consists of two parts. Its root, kartvel-i, specifies an inhabitant of the core central-eastern Georgian region of Kartli, ancient Greeks and Romans referred to early western Georgians as Colchians and eastern Georgians as Iberians. Today the full, official name of the country is Georgia, before the 1995 constitution came into force the countrys name was the Republic of Georgia. The territory of modern-day Georgia was inhabited by Homo erectus since the Paleolithic Era, the proto-Georgian tribes first appear in written history in the 12th century BC. The earliest evidence of wine to date has found in Georgia. In fact, early metallurgy started in Georgia during the 6th millennium BC, the classical period saw the rise of a number of early Georgian states, the principal of which was Colchis in the west and Iberia in the east
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India
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India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and it is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast. It shares land borders with Pakistan to the west, China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the northeast, in the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Indias Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a border with Thailand. The Indian subcontinent was home to the urban Indus Valley Civilisation of the 3rd millennium BCE, in the following millennium, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism began to be composed. Social stratification, based on caste, emerged in the first millennium BCE, early political consolidations took place under the Maurya and Gupta empires, the later peninsular Middle Kingdoms influenced cultures as far as southeast Asia. In the medieval era, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived, much of the north fell to the Delhi sultanate, the south was united under the Vijayanagara Empire. The economy expanded in the 17th century in the Mughal empire, in the mid-18th century, the subcontinent came under British East India Company rule, and in the mid-19th under British crown rule. A nationalist movement emerged in the late 19th century, which later, under Mahatma Gandhi, was noted for nonviolent resistance, in 2015, the Indian economy was the worlds seventh largest by nominal GDP and third largest by purchasing power parity. Following market-based economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the major economies and is considered a newly industrialised country. However, it continues to face the challenges of poverty, corruption, malnutrition, a nuclear weapons state and regional power, it has the third largest standing army in the world and ranks sixth in military expenditure among nations. India is a constitutional republic governed under a parliamentary system. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society and is home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats. The name India is derived from Indus, which originates from the Old Persian word Hindu, the latter term stems from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which was the historical local appellation for the Indus River. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi, which translates as The people of the Indus, the geographical term Bharat, which is recognised by the Constitution of India as an official name for the country, is used by many Indian languages in its variations. Scholars believe it to be named after the Vedic tribe of Bharatas in the second millennium B. C. E and it is also traditionally associated with the rule of the legendary emperor Bharata. Gaṇarājya is the Sanskrit/Hindi term for republic dating back to the ancient times, hindustan is a Persian name for India dating back to the 3rd century B. C. E. It was introduced into India by the Mughals and widely used since then and its meaning varied, referring to a region that encompassed northern India and Pakistan or India in its entirety
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Parsi
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Parsi /ˈpɑːrsiː/ is one of two Zoroastrian communities majorly located in India and few in Pakistan. At the time of the Arab conquest of Persia, the dominant religion of the region was Zoroastrianism, Iranians rebelled against Arab invaders for almost 200 years, in Iran this period is now known as the Two Centuries of Silence or Period of Silence. During this time many Iranians who are now called Parsi chose to preserve their religious identity by fleeing from Iran to India, the word پارسیان, pronounced Parsian, i. e. Parsi in the Persian language, literally means Persian. Persian is the language of modern Iran, which was formerly known as Persia, and the Persian languages endonym is Farsi. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Parsi, also spelled Parsee, the Parsis, whose name means Persians, are descended from Persian Zoroastrians who emigrated to India to avoid religious persecution by the Muslims. They live chiefly in Mumbai and in a few towns and villages mostly to the South of Mumbai, there is a sizeable Parsee population in Pune as well in Hyderbad. A few Parsee families also reside in Kolkata and Chennai, although they are not, strictly speaking, a caste, since they are not Hindus, they form a well-defined community. The exact date of the Parsi migration is unknown, according to tradition, the Parsis initially settled at Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, but finding themselves still persecuted they set sail for India, arriving in the 8th century. The migration may in fact have taken place as late as the 10th century and they settled first at Diu in Kathiawar but soon moved to south Gujarāt, where they remained for about 800 years as a small agricultural community. The term Pārsi, which in the Persian language is a demonym meaning inhabitant of Pārs, until that time, such texts consistently use the Persian-origin terms Zartoshti Zoroastrian or Vehdin the good religion. The 12th-century Sixteen Shlokas, a Sanskrit text in praise of the Parsis, is the earliest attested use of the term as an identifier for Indian Zoroastrians. The first reference to the Parsis in a European language is from 1322, subsequently, the term appears in the journals of many European travelers, first French and Portuguese, later English, all of whom used a Europeanized version of an apparently local language term. For example, Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta observed in 1563 that there are merchants and we Portuguese call them Jews, but they are not so. In an early 20th-century legal ruling, Justices Davar and Beaman asserted that Parsi was also a used in Iran to refer to Zoroastrians. In any case, the term Parsi itself is not necessarily an indication of their Iranian or Persian origin, moreover, if heredity were the only factor in a determination of ethnicity, the Parsis would count as Parthians according to the Qissa-i Sanjan. Zoroaster taught that good and evil were opposite forces and that it was a duty to make a choice between the two. The two paths are of asha or righteousness and of druj, the lie, Good is represented by Ahura Mazda and evil by Angra Mainyu. The Zoroastrian holy book, called the Avesta, was written in the Avestan language, the Qissa-i Sanjan is a tale of the journey of the Parsis to India from Iran
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Iraq
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The capital, and largest city, is Baghdad. The main ethnic groups are Arabs and Kurds, others include Assyrians, Turkmen, Shabakis, Yazidis, Armenians, Mandeans, Circassians, around 95% of the countrys 36 million citizens are Muslims, with Christianity, Yarsan, Yezidism, and Mandeanism also present. The official languages of Iraq are Arabic and Kurdish, two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, run south through Iraq and into the Shatt al-Arab near the Persian Gulf. These rivers provide Iraq with significant amounts of fertile land, the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, historically known as Mesopotamia, is often referred to as the cradle of civilisation. It was here that mankind first began to read, write, create laws, the area has been home to successive civilisations since the 6th millennium BC. Iraq was the centre of the Akkadian, Sumerian, Assyrian and it was also part of the Median, Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Parthian, Sassanid, Roman, Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, Ayyubid, Mongol, Safavid, Afsharid, and Ottoman empires. Iraqs modern borders were mostly demarcated in 1920 by the League of Nations when the Ottoman Empire was divided by the Treaty of Sèvres, Iraq was placed under the authority of the United Kingdom as the British Mandate of Mesopotamia. A monarchy was established in 1921 and the Kingdom of Iraq gained independence from Britain in 1932, in 1958, the monarchy was overthrown and the Iraqi Republic created. Iraq was controlled by the Arab Socialist Baath Party from 1968 until 2003, after an invasion by the United States and its allies in 2003, Saddam Husseins Baath Party was removed from power and multi-party parliamentary elections were held in 2005. The American presence in Iraq ended in 2011, but the Iraqi insurgency continued and intensified as fighters from the Syrian Civil War spilled into the country, the Arabic name العراق al-ʿIrāq has been in use since before the 6th century. There are several suggested origins for the name, one dates to the Sumerian city of Uruk and is thus ultimately of Sumerian origin, as Uruk was the Akkadian name for the Sumerian city of Urug, containing the Sumerian word for city, UR. An Arabic folk etymology for the name is rooted, well-watered. During the medieval period, there was a region called ʿIrāq ʿArabī for Lower Mesopotamia and ʿIrāq ʿajamī, for the region now situated in Central and Western Iran. The term historically included the south of the Hamrin Mountains. The term Sawad was also used in early Islamic times for the region of the plain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In English, it is either /ɪˈrɑːk/ or /ɪˈræk/, the American Heritage Dictionary, the pronunciation /aɪˈræk/ is frequently heard in U. S. media. Since approximately 10,000 BC, Iraq was one of centres of a Caucasoid Neolithic culture where agriculture, the following Neolithic period is represented by rectangular houses. At the time of the pre-pottery Neolithic, people used vessels made of stone, gypsum, finds of obsidian tools from Anatolia are evidences of early trade relations
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Kurds
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The Kurds are culturally and linguistically closely related to the Iranian peoples and, as a result, are often themselves classified as an Iranian people. A recent Kurdish diaspora has also developed in Western countries, primarily in Germany, the Kurdish language refers collectively to the related dialects spoken by the Kurds. It is mainly spoken in parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria. Kurdish holds official status in Iraq as a national language alongside Arabic, is recognized in Iran as a regional language, the Kurdish languages belong to the northwestern sub‑group of the Iranian languages, which in turn belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. According to Mackenzie, there are few features that all Kurdish dialects have in common. And the fact that this reflects the sense of ethnic identity and unity of the Kurds. The number of Kurds living in Southwest Asia is estimated at close to 30 million, Kurds comprise anywhere from 18% to 20% of the population in Turkey, possibly as high as 25%,15 to 20% in Iraq, 10% in Iran, and 9% in Syria. Kurds form regional majorities in all four of these countries, viz. in Turkish Kurdistan, the Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in West Asia after the Arabs, Persians, and Turks. The total number of Kurds in 1991 was placed at 22.5 million, with 48% of this number living in Turkey, 18% in Iraq, 24% in Iran, and 4% in Syria. Recent emigration accounts for a population of close to 1.5 million in Western countries and this groups population was estimated at close to 0.4 million in 1990. The land of Karda is mentioned on a Sumerian clay-tablet dated to the 3rd millennium B. C. This land was inhabited by the people of Su who dwelt in the regions of Lake Van. Other Sumerian clay-tables referred to the people, who lived in the land of Karda, as the Qarduchi and the Qurti. Many Kurds consider themselves descended from the Medes, an ancient Iranian people, the claimed Median descent is reflected in the words of the Kurdish national anthem, We are the children of the Medes and Kai Khosrow. The Kurdish languages form a subgroup of the Northwestern Iranian languages like Median, some researchers consider the independent Kardouchoi as the ancestors of the Kurds. The term Kurd, however, is first encountered in Arabic sources of the seventh century, the Kurds have ethnically diverse origins. During the Sassanid era, in Kar-Namag i Ardashir i Pabagan, after initially sustaining a heavy defeat, Ardashir I was successful in subjugating the Kurds. In a letter Ardashir I received from his foe, Ardavan V, the usage of the term Kurd during this time period most likely was a social term, designating Northwestern Iranian nomads, rather than a concrete ethnic group
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Iraqi Turkmens
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The Iraqi Turkmens, Iraqi Turks, or Turks of Iraq are a Turkic ethnic group who mostly adhere to a Turkish heritage and identity. They form the third largest ethnic group in Iraq, after Arabs, Iraqi Turkmen mainly reside in northern Iraq and share close cultural ties with Turkey, particularly the Anatolian region. The term Turkmen seems to be a political terminology because it was first used by the British to isolate the Iraqi Turks from Turkey during the Mosul Question during the 1930s. The Iraqi Turkmens are the descendants of various waves of Turkic migration to Mesopotamia beginning from the 7th century until Ottoman rule. With the conquest of Iraq by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1534, followed by Sultan Murad IVs capture of Baghdad in 1638, a large influx of Turks settled down in the region. Most of todays Iraqi Turkmen are the descendants of the Ottoman soldiers, traders, following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Iraqi Turkmen wanted Turkey to annex the Mosul Vilayet and for them to become part of an expanded Turkish state. Although they were recognized as an entity of Iraq in the constitution of 1925. Claims of their population have ranged between 500,000 and 3 million, Iraqi Turkmens are considered to be the third largest ethnic group in Iraq. According to data from the Iraqi Ministry of Planning there was 3 million Iraqi Turkmen living in the country in 2013, the Iraqi Turkmens predominantly live in the north of Iraq, especially in Tal Afar, Mosul, Arbil, Altunkupri, Kirkuk, and Baghdad. Turkmen primarily inhabit a region stretching from northwestern Iraq to the Iraq–Iran border on the southeast, which is rich in resources. The presence of Turkic peoples in what is today Iraq first began in the 7th century when approximately 2 and they arrived in 674 with the Umayyud conquest of Basra. More Turkic troops settled during the 8th century, from Bukhara to Basra, however, it was the wider migration of the Oghuz Turks towards Anatolia which took place at the end of the ninth century that established a substantial Iraqi Turkmen presence. Successive waves of immigration continued under the rule of the Seljuk Turks who assumed positions of military, the second wave of Turkmen to descend on Iraq were the Turks of the Great Seljuq Empire. Large scale migration of the Turkmen in Iraq occurred in 1055 with the invasion of Sultan Tuğrul Bey, the ruler of the Seljuk dynasty. The third wave, and largest, arose during the Ottoman Empire, by the first half of the sixteenth century the Ottomans had begun their expansion into Iraq, waging wars against their arch rival, the Persian Safavids. The Ottomans encouraged migration from Anatolia and the settlement of immigrant Turkmen along northern Iraq, with loyal Turkmen inhabiting the area, the Ottomans were able to maintain a safe route through to the southern provinces of Mesopotamia. Once the new governor was appointed, the town was to be composed of 1,000 foot soldiers, however, war broke out after 89 years of peace and the city was besieged and finally conquered by Abbas the Great in 1624. The Persians ruled the city until 1638 when a massive Ottoman force, led by Sultan Murad IV, in 1639, the Treaty of Zuhab was signed that gave the Ottomans control over Iraq and ended the military conflict between the two empires
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Kazakhstan
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Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in northern Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Kazakhstan is the worlds largest landlocked country, and the ninth largest in the world, Kazakhstan is the dominant nation of Central Asia economically, generating 60% of the regions GDP, primarily through its oil/gas industry. It also has vast mineral resources, Kazakhstan is officially a democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic with a diverse cultural heritage. Kazakhstan shares borders with Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, the terrain of Kazakhstan includes flatlands, steppe, taiga, rock canyons, hills, deltas, snow-capped mountains, and deserts. Kazakhstan has an estimated 18 million people as of 2014, Given its large area, its population density is among the lowest. The capital is Astana, where it was moved in 1997 from Almaty, the territory of Kazakhstan has historically been inhabited by nomadic tribes. This changed in the 13th century, when Genghis Khan occupied the country as part of the Mongolian Empire, following internal struggles among the conquerors, power eventually reverted to the nomads. By the 16th century, the Kazakh emerged as a distinct group, the Russians began advancing into the Kazakh steppe in the 18th century, and by the mid-19th century, they nominally ruled all of Kazakhstan as part of the Russian Empire. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, and subsequent civil war, the territory of Kazakhstan was reorganised several times, in 1936, it was made the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan has worked to develop its economy, especially its dominant hydrocarbon industry. Kazakhstans 131 ethnicities include Kazakhs, Russians, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, the Kazakh language is the state language, and Russian has equal official status for all levels of administrative and institutional purposes. The name Kazakh comes from the ancient Turkic word qaz, to wander, the name Cossack is of the same origin. The Persian suffix -stan means land or place of, so Kazakhstan can be translated as land of the wanderers. Kazakhstan has been inhabited since the Neolithic Age, the regions climate, archaeologists believe that humans first domesticated the horse in the regions vast steppes. Central Asia was originally inhabited by the Scythians, the Cuman entered the steppes of modern-day Kazakhstan around the early 11th century, where they later joined with the Kipchak and established the vast Cuman-Kipchak confederation. Under the Mongol Empire, the largest in history, administrative districts were established. These eventually came under the rule of the emergent Kazakh Khanate, throughout this period, traditional nomadic life and a livestock-based economy continued to dominate the steppe. Nevertheless, the region was the focus of ever-increasing disputes between the native Kazakh emirs and the neighbouring Persian-speaking peoples to the south, at its height the Khanate would rule parts of Central Asia and control Cumania
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Kyrgyzstan
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Kyrgyzstan, officially the Kyrgyz Republic, is a country in Central Asia. Landlocked and mountainous, Kyrgyzstan is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Uzbekistan to the west and southwest, Tajikistan to the southwest and its capital and largest city is Bishkek. Kyrgyzstans recorded history spans over 2,000 years, encompassing a variety of cultures and empires, ethnic Kyrgyz make up the majority of the countrys 5.7 million people, followed by significant minorities of Uzbeks and Russians. Kyrgyz is closely related to other Turkic languages, although Russian remains widely spoken and is the official language, the majority of the population are non-denominational Muslims. In addition to its Turkic origins, Kyrgyz culture bears elements of Persian, Mongolian and Russian influence. Kyrgyz is believed to have derived from the Turkic word for forty, in reference to the forty clans of Manas. Literally, Kyrgyz means We are forty, at the time, in the early 9th century AD, the Uyghurs dominated much of Central Asia, Mongolia, and parts of Russia and China. King, Scythians were early settlers in present-day Kyrgyzstan, the Kyrgyz state reached its greatest expansion after defeating the Uyghur Khaganate in 840 A. D. From the 10th century the Kyrgyz migrated as far as the Tian Shan range, in the twelfth century the Kyrgyz dominion had shrunk to the Altay Range and Sayan Mountains as a result of the Mongol expansion. With the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, the Kyrgyz peacefully became a part of the Mongol Empire in 1207. The descent of the Kyrgyz from the autochthonous Siberian population is confirmed on the hand by the recent genetic studies. Issyk Kul Lake was a stopover on the Silk Road, a route for traders, merchants. Kyrgyz tribes were overrun in the 17th century by the Mongols, in the century by the Manchurian Qing Dynasty. In the late century, the majority part of what is today Kyrgyzstan was ceded to Russia through two treaties between China and Russia. The territory, then known in Russian as Kirghizia, was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1876. The Russian takeover was met with numerous revolts against Tsarist authority, in addition, the suppression of the 1916 rebellion against Russian rule in Central Asia caused many Kyrgyz later to migrate to China. Soviet power was established in the region in 1919. On 5 December 1936, the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic was established as a republic of the Soviet Union
37.
Pashtuns
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The Pashtuns /ˈpʌʃˌtʊnz/ or /ˈpæʃˌtuːnz/, historically known by the exonyms Afghans, and Pathan, are an ethnic group native to Afghanistan and North-Western Pakistan. They are generally classified as Eastern Iranian ethno-linguistically, who use Pashto language and follow Pashtunwali, the origin of Pashtuns is unclear but historians have come across references to various ancient peoples called Pakthas between the 2nd and the 1st millennium BC, who may be their early ancestors. Their history is mostly spread amongst various countries of South and Central Asia, as the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, Pashtuns have been the dominant ethno-linguistic group for over 300 years. The Barakzai dynasty played a role during the Great Game from the 19th century to the 20th century as they were caught between the imperialist designs of the British and Russian empires. There have been many notable Pashtun people throughout history, Ahmad Shah Durrani is regarded as the founder of the modern state of Afghanistan. Under Amanullah Khan, Afghanistan was able to pursue an independent foreign policy, some others include Malala Yousafzai, Shah Rukh Khan, Hamid Karzai, and Imran Khan. They are an important community in Pakistan, which has the largest Pashtun population, Pashtuns attained presidency there and high rankings in sports. They are the worlds largest segmentary lineage ethnic group, according to Ethnologue, the total population of the group is estimated to be around 50 million but an accurate count remains elusive due to the lack of an official census in Afghanistan since 1979. Estimates of the number of Pashtun tribes and clans range from about 350 to over 400, additional Pashtun communities are located in western and northern Afghanistan, the Gilgit–Baltistan and Kashmir regions and northwestern Punjab province of Pakistan. There are also sizeable Muslim communities in India, which are of largely Pashtun ancestry, throughout the Indian subcontinent, they are often referred to as Pathans. Smaller Pashtun communities are found in the countries of the Middle East, such as in the Khorasan Province of Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, Europe, important metropolitan centres of Pashtun culture include Peshawar, Quetta, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Kunduz, and Lashkar Gah. The cities of Kabul and Ghazni in Afghanistan are home to around 25% Pashtun population while Herat, with as high as 7 million by some estimates, the city of Karachi in Sindh, Pakistan has the largest concentration of urban Pashtuns in the world. In addition, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, and Lahore also have sizeable Pashtun populations, about 15% of Pakistans nearly 200 million population is Pashtun. In Afghanistan, they are the largest ethnic group and make up between 42-60% of the 32.5 million population. The exact figure remains uncertain in Afghanistan, which is affected by the 1.5 million or more Afghan refugees that remain in Pakistan. Another one million or more Afghans live in Iran, a cumulative population assessment suggests a total of around 49 million individuals all across the world. A prominent institution of the Pashtun people is the system of tribes. Despite this, many people identify themselves with various clans
38.
Balochs
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They mainly speak the Balochi language, a branch of Northwestern Iranian languages, and are an Iranic people. About 50% of the total Baloch population live in Balochistan, a province of Pakistan, 40% of Baloch are settled in Sindh. They make up nearly 3. 6% of the Pakistani population, about 2% of Irans population, prominent Baloch people in Pakistan include former Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali and former President Asif Ali Zardari who is an ethnic Baloch from Sindh. Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry born in Quetta, is the longest-serving Chief Justice of Pakistan is another prominent Baloch personality, the son of Benazir Bhutto, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is the Chief of the Baloch Zardari tribe. Farooq Leghari was the first ever ethnic Baloch to be elected President, the exact origin of the word Baloch is unclear. Rawlinson believed that it is derived from the name of the Babylonian king, dames believed that it is derived from the Persian term for cockscomb, said to have been used as a crest on the helmets of Baloch troops in 6th century BCE. Herzfeld proposed that it is derived from the Median term brza-vaciya, the remnants of the original name such as Balochuk and Balochiki are said to be still used as ethnic names in Balochistan. Some writers suggest a derivation from Sanskrit words bal, meaning strength, the army in question is that of the Umayyad Caliphate after the conquest of Sindh. According to Baloch lore, their ancestors hail from Aleppo in what is now Syria and they are descendants of Hazrat Ameer Hamza, uncle of the prophet Muhammad, who settled in Halab. and they fled to the Sistan region. They allegedly remained there for nearly 500 years until they fled following a deception against the Sistan leader Badr-ud-Din to the Makran region, the Baloch began migrating towards the east in the late Sasanian period. The cause of the migration is unknown but may have been as a result of the unstable conditions in the Caspian area. The migrations occurred over several centuries and this brought them into conflict with the Buyids, and later the Ghaznavids and the Seljuqs. Adud al-Dawla of the Buyid dynasty launched a campaign against them. By the 13/14th centuries waves of Baloch were moving into Sindh, according to Dr. Akhtar Baloch, Professor at University of Karachi, the Balochis migrated from Balochistan during the Little Ice Age and settled in Sindh and Punjab. The Little Ice Age is conventionally defined as an extending from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, or alternatively. Although climatologists and historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on either the start or end dates of this period, which varied according to local conditions. According to Professor Baloch, the climate of Balochistan was very cold, the area where the Baloch tribes settled was disputed between the Persian Safavids and the Mughal emperors. Although the Mughals managed to some control over the eastern parts of the area, by the 17th century
39.
Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
40.
Tabasarans
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The Tabasarans are an ethnic group who live mostly in Dagestan, Russia. Their population in Russia is about 150,000, russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva and Kamal Khan-Magomedov, the 2015 European Games champion in mens Judo -66 kg, are half-Tabasaran
41.
Crimean Tatars
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Crimean Tatars constituted the majority of Crimeas population from the time of its ethnogenesis until mid-19th century, and the relative largest ethnic population until the end of 19th century. Starting in 1967, some were allowed to return to Crimea, today, Crimean Tatars constitute approximately 12% of the population of Crimea. There remains a large diaspora of Crimean Tatars in Turkey and Uzbekistan, in the latest Ukrainian census,248,200 Ukrainian citizens identified themselves as Crimean Tatars with 98% of them living in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. An additional 1,800 citizens live in the city of Sevastopol, also on the Crimean peninsula, about 150,000 remain in exile in Central Asia, mainly in Uzbekistan. The official number of Crimean Tatars in Turkey is 150,000 with some Crimean Tatar activists estimating a figure as high as 6 million. The activists reached this number by taking one million Tatar immigrants to Turkey as a starting point, Crimean Tatars in Turkey mostly live in Eskişehir Province, descendants of those who emigrated in the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Dobruja region straddling Romania and Bulgaria, there are more than 27,000 Crimean Tatars,24,000 on the Romanian side, and 3,000 on the Bulgarian side. However, the Cuman language is considered the ancestor of the current language of the Crimean Tatars with possible incorporations of the other languages like Crimean Gothic. Another theory suggests Crimean Tatars trace their origins to the waves of ancient people Scythians, Greeks, Goths, Italians and Armenians. Goths, Gypsies, and Greeks were assumed to be some of the ancestors of the Tatars on the coast of Crimea, while there were mixed hill Tatars, Italians and Greeks mixed with the coastal Crimean Tatars. The Crimean Tatars emerged as a nation at the time of the Crimean Khanate, the Turkic-speaking population of the Crimea had mostly adopted Islam already in the 14th century, following the conversion of Ozbeg Khan of the Golden Horde. Until the beginning of the 18th century, Crimean Tatars were known for frequent, at some periods almost annual, devastating raids into Ukraine and Russia. For a long time, until the late 18th century, the Crimean Khanate maintained a massive trade with the Ottoman Empire. One of the most important trading ports and slave markets was Kefe, slaves and freedmen formed approximately 75% of the Crimean population. Some researchers estimate that altogether up to 3 million people were captured and enslaved during the time of the Crimean Khanate, the Don Cossacks and Kalmyk Mongols also managed to raid Crimean Tatars land. The last recorded major Crimean raid, before those in the Russo-Turkish War took place during the reign of Peter the Great, however, Cossack raids continued after that time, Ottoman Grand Vizier complained to the Russian consul about raids to Crimea and Özi in 1761. In 1769 one last major Tatar raid, which took place during the Russo-Turkish War, after a period of political unrest in Crimea, Russia violated the treaty and annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783. After the annexation, the wealthier Tatars, who had exported wheat, meat, fish and wine to other parts of the Black Sea, began to be expelled, further expulsions followed in 1812 for fear of the reliability of the Tatars in the face of Napoleons advance
42.
Syria
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Syrias capital and largest city is Damascus. Religious groups include Sunnis, Christians, Alawites, Druze, Mandeans, Shiites, Salafis, Sunni Arabs make up the largest religious group in Syria. Its capital Damascus and largest city Aleppo are among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, in the Islamic era, Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate and a provincial capital of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt. The post-independence period was tumultuous, and a number of military coups. In 1958, Syria entered a union with Egypt called the United Arab Republic. Syria was under Emergency Law from 1963 to 2011, effectively suspending most constitutional protections for citizens, Bashar al-Assad has been president since 2000 and was preceded by his father Hafez al-Assad, who was in office from 1970 to 2000. Mainstream modern academic opinion strongly favours the argument that the Greek word is related to the cognate Ἀσσυρία, Assyria, in the past, others believed that it was derived from Siryon, the name that the Sidonians gave to Mount Hermon. However, the discovery of the inscription in 2000 seems to support the theory that the term Syria derives from Assyria. The area designated by the word has changed over time, since approximately 10,000 BC, Syria was one of centers of Neolithic culture where agriculture and cattle breeding appeared for the first time in the world. The following Neolithic period is represented by houses of Mureybet culture. At the time of the pre-pottery Neolithic, people used vessels made of stone, gyps, finds of obsidian tools from Anatolia are evidences of early trade relations. Cities of Hamoukar and Emar played an important role during the late Neolithic, archaeologists have demonstrated that civilization in Syria was one of the most ancient on earth, perhaps preceded by only those of Mesopotamia. The earliest recorded indigenous civilisation in the region was the Kingdom of Ebla near present-day Idlib, gifts from Pharaohs, found during excavations, confirm Eblas contact with Egypt. One of the earliest written texts from Syria is an agreement between Vizier Ibrium of Ebla and an ambiguous kingdom called Abarsal c.2300 BC. The Northwest Semitic language of the Amorites is the earliest attested of the Canaanite languages, Mari reemerged during this period, and saw renewed prosperity until conquered by Hammurabi of Babylon. Ugarit also arose during this time, circa 1800 BC, close to modern Latakia, Ugaritic was a Semitic language loosely related to the Canaanite languages, and developed the Ugaritic alphabet. The Ugarites kingdom survived until its destruction at the hands of the marauding Indo-European Sea Peoples in the 12th century BC, Yamhad was described in the tablets of Mari as the mightiest state in the near east and as having more vassals than Hammurabi of Babylon. Yamhad imposed its authority over Alalakh, Qatna, the Hurrians states, the army of Yamhad campaigned as far away as Dēr on the border of Elam
43.
Tajikistan
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Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan, is a mountainous, landlocked country in Central Asia with an estimated 8 million people in 2013, and an area of 143,100 km2. It is bordered by Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to the south, the Republic of Uzbekistan to the west, the Kyrgyz Republic to the north, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan lies to the south, separated by the narrow Wakhan Corridor. Traditional homelands of Tajik people included present-day Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, a civil war was fought almost immediately after independence, lasting from 1992 to 1997. Since the end of the war, newly established political stability, Tajikistan is a presidential republic consisting of four provinces. Most of Tajikistans 8 million people belong to the Tajik ethnic group, many Tajiks also speak Russian as their second language. Mountains cover more than 90% of the country and it has a transition economy that is highly dependent on remittances, aluminium and cotton production. Tajikistan means the Land of the Tajiks, the suffix -stan is Persian for place of or country and Tajik is, most likely, the name of a pre-Islamic tribe. Tajikistan appeared as Tadjikistan or Tadzhikistan in English prior to 1991 and this is due to a transliteration from the Russian, Таджикистан. In Russian, there is no single letter j to represent the phoneme /ʤ/ and дж, Tadzhikistan is the most common alternate spelling and is widely used in English literature derived from Russian sources. Tadjikistan is the spelling in French and can occasionally be found in English language texts, the way of writing Tajikistan in the Perso-Arabic script is. The earliest recorded history of the dates back to about 500 BCE when much, if not all. After the regions conquest by Alexander the Great it became part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, northern Tajikistan was part of Sogdia, a collection of city-states which was overrun by Scythians and Yuezhi nomadic tribes around 150 BCE. The Silk Road passed through the region and following the expedition of Chinese explorer Zhang Qian during the reign of Wudi commercial relations between Han China and Sogdiana flourished. Sogdians played a role in facilitating trade and also worked in other capacities, as farmers, carpetweavers, glassmakers. Later the Hephthalite Empire, a collection of tribes, moved into the region. Central Asia continued in its role as a crossroads, linking China, the steppes to the north. It was temporarily under the control of the Tibetan empire and Chinese from 650–680, the Samanid Empire,819 to 999, restored Persian control of the region and enlarged the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara which became the cultural centres of Iran and the region was known as Khorasan. The Kara-Khanid Khanate conquered Transoxania and ruled between 999–1211, during Genghis Khans invasion of Khwarezmia in the early 13th century the Mongol Empire took control over nearly all of Central Asia
44.
Turkey
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Turkey, officially the Republic of Turkey, is a transcontinental country in Eurasia, mainly in Anatolia in Western Asia, with a smaller portion on the Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. Turkey is a democratic, secular, unitary, parliamentary republic with a cultural heritage. The country is encircled by seas on three sides, the Aegean Sea is to the west, the Black Sea to the north, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. The Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles, Ankara is the capital while Istanbul is the countrys largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Approximately 70-80% of the countrys citizens identify themselves as ethnic Turks, other ethnic groups include legally recognised and unrecognised minorities. Kurds are the largest ethnic minority group, making up approximately 20% of the population, the area of Turkey has been inhabited since the Paleolithic by various ancient Anatolian civilisations, as well as Assyrians, Greeks, Thracians, Phrygians, Urartians and Armenians. After Alexander the Greats conquest, the area was Hellenized, a process continued under the Roman Empire. The Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm ruled Anatolia until the Mongol invasion in 1243, the empire reached the peak of its power in the 16th century, especially during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. During the war, the Ottoman government committed genocides against its Armenian, Assyrian, following the war, the conglomeration of territories and peoples that formerly comprised the Ottoman Empire was partitioned into several new states. Turkey is a member of the UN, an early member of NATO. Turkeys growing economy and diplomatic initiatives have led to its recognition as a regional power while her location has given it geopolitical, the name of Turkey is based on the ethnonym Türk. The first recorded use of the term Türk or Türük as an autonym is contained in the Old Turkic inscriptions of the Göktürks of Central Asia, the English name Turkey first appeared in the late 14th century and is derived from Medieval Latin Turchia. Similarly, the medieval Khazar Empire, a Turkic state on the shores of the Black. The medieval Arabs referred to the Mamluk Sultanate as al-Dawla al-Turkiyya, the Ottoman Empire was sometimes referred to as Turkey or the Turkish Empire among its European contemporaries. The Anatolian peninsula, comprising most of modern Turkey, is one of the oldest permanently settled regions in the world, various ancient Anatolian populations have lived in Anatolia, from at least the Neolithic period until the Hellenistic period. Many of these peoples spoke the Anatolian languages, a branch of the larger Indo-European language family, in fact, given the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical centre from which the Indo-European languages radiated. The European part of Turkey, called Eastern Thrace, has also been inhabited since at least forty years ago. It is the largest and best-preserved Neolithic site found to date, the settlement of Troy started in the Neolithic Age and continued into the Iron Age
45.
Azerbaijanis in Turkey
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This article is about Azerbaijanis in Russia. For Azerbaijanis in general, see the respective article, Azerbaijanis in Turkey or Turkish Azerbaijanis are Azerbaijani people in Turkey, and are Turkish citizens and permanent residents of ethnic Azerbaijani background. It is hard to determine how many ethnic Azerbaijanis currently reside in Turkey because ethnicity is a fluid concept in this country. According to some sources, there are about 800,000 Twelver Shias in Turkey, looklex Encyclopaedia puts the number of Azerbaijanis in Turkey at 800,000. Up to 300,000 of Azerbaijanis who reside in Turkey are citizens of Azerbaijan, in the Eastern Anatolia Region, Azerbaijanis are sometimes referred to as acem or tat. They currently are the largest ethnic group in the city of Iğdır and second largest ethnic group in Kars, Azerbaijanis first settled in what is now Turkey during the period of Safavi governance over Kars and neighbouring areas. The Turkish dialect of Erzurum has been influenced by the Azerbaijani language. Phonemic analyses indicate that Azeri-influenced dialects are spoken as far as Elâzığ, in 1813, a group of Azerbaijanis from Karabakh settled in Aziziye, in the southern part of the Afyon Province. Despite having undergone major assimilation in their language and religious beliefs, a different branch of the same group settled in Iğdır. Caferoğlu argues that the Afyon group may have left Karabakh for Turkey much earlier, in 1578, in addition, in the early nineteenth century, several Sunni families from Shirvan, particularly from Agsu, settled in Amasya, where for a long time they were known as Şirvanlı. In 1894, a unique baroque-style mosque was built here by Şeyh Hacı Mahmut Efendi, the mosque has been known as the Şirvanlı Mosque or the Azerîler Mosque. The descendants of those migrants nowadays live in six villages of Amasyas Suluova and Merzifon districts and have preserved their Azeri identity, another group of Azerbaijanis from Shaki relocated to Bursa in 1863. In 1941, already 5,000 Azerbaijanis lived in 60 villages along the Turkish bank of the Arpaçay, the signing of Soviet-Turkish non-aggression pacts in 1925 and 1935 created obstacles in continuing this activity in the form of arrests and bans on the publishing of anti-Soviet periodicals. This forced some politically active members of the movement to relocate to Germany, after the failure of the USSR-created regional Azerbaijan Peoples Government in 1946, ethnic Azerbaijani political immigrants from Iran increased the numbers of Azerbaijanis in Turkey. By 1990, about 400,000 Azerbaijanis lived in a belt of land on the Turkish side of the Soviet border. Finally, starting from the early 1990s tens of thousands of immigrants from the newly independent Azerbaijan have made their way to Turkey due to economic reasons, settling mostly in big cities. According to the Turkish Ministry of the Interior, between 2003 and 2013 alone over 15,000 immigrants from Azerbaijan received Turkish citizenship, the Terekeme people are often considered a sub-ethnic group of Azerbaijanis of Sunni Muslim background. In general, the Azerbaijani population in Turkey is considered well-integrated into Turkish society, mainly due to cultural, nevertheless, differences still remain in the areas of religion, dialect, and self-conception in terms of historical memory and ethnic/national consciousness
46.
Turkmenistan
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Turkmenistan has been at the crossroads of civilizations for centuries. In medieval times, Merv was one of the cities of the Islamic world and an important stop on the Silk Road. Annexed by the Russian Empire in 1881, Turkmenistan later figured prominently in the movement in Central Asia. In 1924, Turkmenistan became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, Turkmenistan possesses the worlds fourth largest reserves of natural gas resources. Most of the country is covered by the Karakum Desert, since 1993, citizens have received government-provided electricity, water and natural gas free of charge. Turkmenistan was ruled by President for Life Saparmurat Niyazov until his death in 2006, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow was elected president in 2007. According to Human Rights Watch, Turkmenistan remains one of the world’s most repressive countries, after suspending the death penalty, the use of capital punishment was formally abolished in the 2008 constitution. Historically inhabited by the Indo-Iranians, the history of Turkmenistan begins with its annexation by the Achaemenid Empire of Ancient Iran. In the 8th century AD, Turkic-speaking Oghuz tribes moved from Mongolia into present-day Central Asia, part of a powerful confederation of tribes, these Oghuz formed the ethnic basis of the modern Turkmen population. In the 10th century, the name Turkmen was first applied to Oghuz groups that accepted Islam, There they were under the dominion of the Seljuk Empire, which was composed of Oghuz groups living in present-day Iran and Turkmenistan. Turkmen soldiers in the service of the played a important role in the spreading of Turkic culture when they migrated westward into present-day Azerbaijan. In the 12th century, Turkmen and other tribes overthrew the Seljuk Empire, in the next century, the Mongols took over the more northern lands where the Turkmens had settled, scattering the Turkmens southward and contributing to the formation of new tribal groups. The sixteenth and eighteenth centuries saw a series of splits and confederations among the nomadic Turkmen tribes, by the 16th century, most of those tribes were under the nominal control of two sedentary Uzbek khanates, Khiva and Bukhoro. Turkmen soldiers were an important element of the Uzbek militaries of this period, in the 19th century, raids and rebellions by the Yomud Turkmen group resulted in that groups dispersal by the Uzbek rulers. According to Paul R. Spickard, Prior to the Russian conquest, Russian forces began occupying Turkmen territory late in the 19th century. From their Caspian Sea base at Krasnovodsk, the Russians eventually overcame the Uzbek khanates, in 1916 the Russian Empires participation in World War I resonated in Turkmenistan, as an anticonscription revolt swept most of Russian Central Asia. In 1924 the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic was formed from the tsarist province of Transcaspia, by the late 1930s, Soviet reorganization of agriculture had destroyed what remained of the nomadic lifestyle in Turkmenistan, and Moscow controlled political life. The Ashgabat earthquake of 1948 killed over 110,000 people, during the next half-century, Turkmenistan played its designated economic role within the Soviet Union and remained outside the course of major world events
Afghanistan (21 March)[24]
Albania (22 March)[1][2]
Azerbaijan (20 March to 26 March, total of seven days)[77][78]
Georgia[79]
Iran (20 March to 24 March, total of five days in general and total of 14 days for schools and universities)[80]
Iraq (de jure in 
Iraqi Kurdistan, de facto national)[6] (21 March)[81]
Kazakhstan (21 March to 24 March, total of four days)[7]
Kosovo (21 March)
Kyrgyzstan (21 March)[82][83]
Bayan-Ölgii, Mongolia (22 March, regional state holiday only)[3]
Tajikistan (20 March to 23 March, total of four days)[12][84]
Turkmenistan (21 March to 22 March, total of two days)[85]
Uzbekistan (21 March)[86]
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