Central Asian languages

When I visited the Republic of Georgia a few years ago, I found that Georgians under 40 tend to speak English as a second language, and Georgians over 40 tend to speak Russian.  This should perhaps be no surprise given the timetable of Soviet dissolution and the country’s efforts to integrate, economically and politically, with the West.

Central Asia presents a more chaotic language landscape.  Yes, there are certainly a fair number of people who speak English, but it doesn’t seem to coordinate with age.  Russian, on the other hand, is everywhere. Almost everyone speaks the national language plus Russian.  Russian is still taught in schools. The further east you go, the more Cyrillic characters dominate the signage.

In addition to this language feature, the historical local languages are official in every country.  Turkmen is spoken in Turkmenistan, Uzbeki in Uzbekistan, Tajik in Tajikistan….except that the language maps don’t necessarily correspond with political maps.  In Uzbekistan, a good swath of the middle of the country has historical ties to the Tajik people, whose empire flourished in the 9^th-14^th centuries CE.  So the primary language in Bukhara and Samarkand, Uzbekistan, is actually….Tajik.  Which is a Persian language, akin to Farsi.  Khiva, in the west, primarily speaks Uzbeki, which is a Turkic language (like Turkish and Turkmen).  To make things even more confusing, Turkic and Persian alphabets are not the same, nor is there much vocabulary crossover.  So for instance, the local ruler in the Turkic lands was a sultan, while in the Tajik areas it was an amir (or emir, as in U.A.Emirates)

Arab tribes spreading Islam swept over the whole area in the 8^th-9^th C CE so there are also Arabic words across cultures.  And Genghis Khan brough his Mongol hordes here as well in the 13^th-14^th C CE (so those sultans and amirs were also called khan—or, in Turkey, han, as in the Osman Han Ottoman dynasty).  

Traveling between the Stans, I find it very difficult to attempt politeness in local languages, in part because they seem to change every 100 miles.  I’m sticking with salam aleikem as a hello, and rakhmat, or thank you, which two meager terms at least so far have produced warm smiles and reciprocated greeting.

Feeling stressed by proxy at the thought of trying to navigate these wildly divergent places that have all been historically lumped together, as if to suggest to the foreign explorer that it will be no small thing to move from one country to the next?  Well, then, please enjoy this baby peacock from the summer palace of the last amir of Bukhara.