Tajik is the official language of the Republic of Tajikistan and is spoken by an estimated 4 million people in Tajikistan and the surrounding areas of Kyrgyzstan
and Uzbekistan. Several simple variants are spoken in Tajikistan with a basis in grammatical Tajik. Being so close to the Persian spoken in Afghanistan and Iran, Tajik is sometimes considered to be a Persian dialect. However, due to the close relationship of the peoples of Tajikistan with speakers of Turkic languages, and considering the large number of its speakers also able to communicate in Kyrgyz and Uzbek, Turkic has had a greater influence than Persian. Indeed, the vocabularies of Tajik and Persian show a considerable degree of divergence in recent times because Tajik has borrowed numerous technical, cultural, and political terms from Russian, while Persian has done its borrowing principally from the languages of western Europe. Both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan broadcast Tajik radio and television programs and have published numerous magazines, newspapers and books in the Tajik language.