Focus on Tajikistan's Turkmen Community
Focus on Tajikistan's Turkmen Community
Turkmenistan, the most politically isolated of the Central Asian republics, has sent a cultural mission to Tajikistan, which has a small community of ethnic Turkmen.
Jilikul district in southern Tajikistan is home to around 27,000 ethnic Turkmen. The main problem they face there, they say, is in getting resources to maintain their language. The textbooks used in the eight local schools where Turkmen is the teaching medium are all old.
People find it difficult to read the language because Turkmenistan has switched to using Latin script rather than the Cyrillic with which they are familiar.
The audio programme, in Russian and Tajik, went out on national radio stations in Tajikistan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
