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.
Within a single lifetime, Tajik was written three different ways. Zehni recorded the word through every change — and lost nothing.
The next change will be the deepest yet. The Zehni Foundation exists so that when language becomes data, the word still arrives whole.
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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.
From the bazaars of Samarkand, Persian words traveled the caravan routes into the everyday speech of the world.
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.
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