Tajik is the official language and is spoken by most people in Tajikistan. A member of the southwest group of Iranian languages, it is closely related to the mutually intelligible dialects of Farsi and Dari in Iran and Afghanistan, respectively, though it differs from these dialects in that it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The dialects of the Pamirs and the Yaghnob River valley, which were classified as Tajik during the Soviet era, actually belong to the eastern group of Iranian languages; speakers of these dialects must use Tajik as a lingua franca to communicate with outsiders. Russian is widely used for administration and business, but few speak it natively. Uzbek is the second most widely spoken language and is written in the Cyrillic script, unlike in Uzbekistan where Uzbek is written in a modified Latin alphabet.
