Tajik is a South-West Iranian language that is genetically closely related to such major languages as Persian and Dari. Most Tajik speakers are in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan; within Uzbekistan, Samarqand and Bukhara are particularly densely populated by Tajik speakers. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Tajik was considered by a number of writers and researchers to be a variety of Persian. The language that this book describes is the modern Tajik language which is referred to in the Soviet linguistic literature typically as zaboni khozirai tojik. The morphological segmentability of Tajik words is markedly high compared to words in the Indo-Iranian predecessors of Tajik, which makes Tajik morphologically more agglutinative than inflectional. Outstanding features of Tajik include the modal opposition between the indicative mood and the mood of indirect evidence, i.e. the inferential mood, that pervades the verbal system, and the utilization of both post-nominal and pre-nominal relative clauses.