Literature in Iran
Persian is Iran's official language and the language of the country's ethnic majority (i.e., the Persians), and Persian literature has been the country's most influential literary tradition. Apart from Iran, Persian literature was used and developed further through several medieval Persianate societies in Asia Minor, Central Asia, and South Asia, and the language is still used widely in Central Asia (Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) and Afghanistan.
Tajiks
In an interview to Iranian news media in May 2008, Tajikistan's deputy culture minister said that Tajikistan would study the issue of switching its Tajik alphabet from Cyrillic to the Persian script used in Iran and Afghanistan when the government feels that "the Tajik people became familiar with the Persian alphabet". More recently, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan seeks to have the nation's language referred to as "Tajiki-Farsi" rather than "Tajik." The proposal has drawn criticism from Russian media since the bill seeks to remove the Russian language as the mode of interethnic communication. In 1989, the original name of the language (Farsi) was added to its official name in brackets. However, Rahmon's government renamed the language to simply 'Tajiki' in 1994. On October 2009, Tajikistan adopted the law that removes Russian as the "language for interethnic communication."