Carrying the oldest words a thousand years forward.

Founded in the name of Turaqul Zehni — linguist, poet and lexicographer of the Tajik tongue — to keep one of the world’s oldest living languages thriving into its next age: digital, global, machine-read.

Join the foundation See the work →

بسی رنج بردم در این سال سی
عجم زنده کردم بدین پارسی

“Thirty years I bore this toil — and brought the Persian tongue to life again.”

Ferdowsi · Shahnameh · c. 1010

From the foundation’s charter

سخن

sukhan

сухан

/suː'xan/

noun · Tajik–Persian

Continuity through rupture

One word. Three alphabets.
One century.

Within a single lifetime, Tajik was written three different ways. Zehni recorded the word through every change — and lost nothing.

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The next change will be the deepest yet. The Zehni Foundation exists so that when language becomes data, the word still arrives whole.

Write a word in three hands →

The work

Four endeavors,
from the archive to the algorithm.

Enter the Sukhan Archive → Read the Tashhis Letters →

The craft of the mark

A name built as tilework.

Square Kufic — the calligraphy of brickwork and glazed tile — reduces a word to right angles a mason could lay. The same geometry that faces the Registan spells Zehni here, on a 12 × 14 modular grid.

12 × 14 · square kufic · reads “zehni”

The reach of a language

Words that walked the Silk Road

From the bazaars of Samarkand, Persian words traveled the caravan routes into the everyday speech of the world.

Tap a word to trace its journey

An endowment for the word

May the word outlast us all.

In the tradition of the great endowments — the libraries, the madrasas, the fountains — the foundation welcomes gifts dedicated to the language itself. Each is inscribed in the foundation’s register, in three scripts.

Endow the word or write to our office → [email protected]

[email protected] · Samarkand & Dushanbe

The man & the foundation

Turaqul Zehni

The foundation takes its name from Turaqul Zehni — a pen name, from the Arabic zihn (“mind”), of the scholar born Narziqulov, who also wrote under Somoni, Rustam, Mushfiqi, Quchqor and Mullo. A linguist, poet and lexicographer of Tajik–Persian, he taught the first Soviet Tajik generation through grammars and readers printed first in Arabic script and then in the new Latin, made the first Tajik translation of Gogol’s The Overcoat (1928), co-compiled the two-volume Dictionary of the Tajik Language (1969, some 45,000 entries), and wrote San’ati sukhan (“The Art of the Word”), the poetics that became a standard university text for generations of Tajik philologists.

Across a career reaching from the 1920s into the 1980s and more than three hundred articles, his lifework spanned all three alphabets in which Tajik was written within a single century. The Zehni Foundation continues that work: conserving and digitising the historical lexicon he helped build, supporting the poets, teachers and lexicographers who keep the language spoken, and funding the fonts, keyboards, corpora and language models that carry Tajik and its neighbours into the computational age.