Sarikoli

Sarikoli is an Eastern Iranian language of the Pamir group, spoken by roughly 30,000 people in Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County, in the Pamirs of western Xinjiang, China — the only country where it is spoken. Its speakers are most of the people China classifies as its Tajik nationality — about 10,000 of that nationality speak Wakhi instead — but Sarikoli is not the Tajik of Tajikistan: Tajik proper is a Western Iranian language close to Persian, while Sarikoli belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch, and the two are not mutually intelligible. Its closest relatives are Shughni, of which Rushani is a dialect, and Yazghulami; Wakhi, though spoken nearby and often grouped with them as a Pamir language, belongs to a different branch of Eastern Iranian and is not mutually intelligible with Sarikoli. Sarikoli is unwritten; speakers use Uyghur and Chinese in writing, and many also speak Kyrgyz. Tashkurgan sits on the old Silk Road route over the Pamirs toward the Karakoram, and its name means 'stone fortress' in Turkic.

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