Parya of the Hissar Valley There are 4,000 known Parya speakers living in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan (www.ethnologue.com/language/paq).

In 1977 A Russian Linguist named Oranskiy, after surveying the area, wrote a brief history of the language since the 1950s, a language description, a preliminary dictionary and collected dozens of folktales from the Parya people in a book, Фольклор и Язык Гиссарских Парья, “The Folklore and Language of the Hissar Parya”. In His book, Oranskiy describes the stability of the language in the home with monolingual preschool aged children despite the community being fully bilingual in Tajik or Uzbek and culturally make little distinction from the majority groups (§ 9).

The purpose of our work at TICRO is to maintain and preserve the Parya language and to work toward literacy for mother-tongue speakers in their language. In 2014 work began on a script and alphabet for the language based on Cyrillic. In 2014 the first book in that Cyrillic-based script, Шеъруко Намунасо Ҷааткуле Парягӣ Алифбама (Poems for children with the Parya Alphabet) was published. Two years later, in 2016, Паря Амӱко Кӓйӥ (Афсонаҳои Мардуми Паря /Folktalks of the Parya People) was published and dedicated at the Academy of Sciences in Dushanbe. The book was published with a Tajik translation of each story.

Plans are underway for recording the stories in Паря Амӱко Кӓйӥ to be available for audio format, in addition to an English Translation of the book, a more detailed Parya-Tajik-English dictionary, grammar primer, phrase book, original music recordings and more.

Probably the greatest desire of the Parya people is to discover their exact origin and the Indo-Aryan language most similar to their own. “The Parya ideas of their history do not extend beyond the memory of one or two generations preceding the oldest speaker who is alive (Oranskiy, § 10)”. With the help of Linguists from around the world, Ticro is working to find the origin of the Parya language and people through comparative and historical linguistic study, starting with languages in India and Pakistan.