Written by Afsheen Sharifzadeh, a graduate of Tufts University focusing on Iran and the Caucasus. The present article aims to explain the etymology of the Khorezmian “Lazgi” and examine the origins of the UNESCO-recognized dance repertoire and lyrical accompaniment. Notably, with nearly 60% of a version of the lyrics consisting of Persian phraseology and vocabulary which is partially unintelligible to Khorezmian Turkic speakers, lazgi represents an exponent of Persianate material and performance culture in Central Asia.

Etymology and Origin of Lazgi
The term “Lazgi” is supposedly of elusive origin, according to several Uzbek scholars who have mused on the subject of the UNESCO-recognized dance.¹ In spite of one compelling origin for the word, review of their work reveals no attempt to assign any etymology to lazgi except in one instance where we encounter the vague descriptor “ancient.” I would like to put to rest the hitherto nationalist-driven amnesia on the origin of lazgi, and establish the word as either a corruption of the dialectal Persian ларзагӣ لرزگى larz[a]gī “trembling” or more likely, a calque of the Persian form larzon combining the Persian larz “tremble” + the Turkic adjective formant -gi/-ki: “shaky; trembly”.

Based on a prevalent Khorezmian social memory endorsed by Uzbek authors, the word lazgi apparently originally described the trembling wrist, finger and shoulder motions employed by performers of the dance (compare Persian لرزيدن larzēdan “to tremble”). Dances involving trembling movements are encountered throughout the Iranic world; indeed, larzon-larzon “shake-shake” is a lyric in the Mavrigi (lit. “from Merv”) repertoire from nearby Bukhara. Languages commonly make use of action verbs that apparently describe an element of the dance: e.g. Mandarin 跳舞 tiàowǔ “to dance” from a verb 舞 meaning “to flutter; to soar”; Sorani Kurdish hałpařîn from the verb pařîn meaning “to jump; to leap”; Armenian պարել parel “to dance” from a word meaning “to encircle, to surround”; Persian پای کوبی pāy kūbī “dance” but literally “foot-stomping.”

Additionally, since the affix –gi is common to both Central Asian Karluk and Oghuz Turkic, but also exists in high frequency in Persian, particularly in the Northern Tajik dialects of nearby Bukhara and Samarqand, the second segment of the word less easily interpreted. Aside from its use in forming quality nouns from adjectives (зиндагӣ زندگى zindagi “life”), Northern Tajik makes liberal use of -gī to create participles with a range of adjectival and verbal uses, including the present perfect, past perfect, and conjectural tenses (click here for more on Northern Tajik by the same author). On the other hand, Northern Tajik has made use of the Turkic suffix -gī to describe dance/musical styles in particular: Мавригӣ “Mavrigī” meaning “the dance style of Merv” (a historic Persian-speaking oasis in Khorāsān whose entire population of about 100,000 was deported en masse in 1788-9 A.D. by the Manghit Emir of Bukhara to the Bukharan and Samarqand oases and thence referred to as “Iranians” ēroniy in Soviet and Uzbek censuses); “Buxorogī” “of or pertaining to the style of Bukhara; Bukharan dance”.

The current shape of the word lazgi is explained by internal transformations (r-drop preceding dental consonants is common in Northern Tajik varieties: vernacular kadan for literary кардан kardan “to do”; syncope of unstressed vowels is also prevalent: ondagī for омадагӣ omadagī “he/she has come”), but it is not difficult to imagine the scenario where monolingual Turkic speakers imperfectly acquired an unfamiliar foreign word.

On the subject of the origin of the technical aspects of the dance–which is typified by rapid trembling motions of the wrists and fingers, periodically expanding to include the shoulders and forearms, as well as neck and shoulder-sliding–is self-evidently a member of the broader Iranian dance systems that have existed among the autochthonous Iranian population of Central Asia for millennia. Movements are diverse and energetic, with the performer sometimes miming lyrical themes such as a heartbeat, or rays emanating from a sun. The costume worn by women lazgi performers consists of colorful, slender dresses adorned with coins or sequins, a round headdress ornamented with bands of coins and a large white feather, with the hair tied in multiple long braids per classical Iranian styles. Men who occasionally appear as embellishment wear heavy, bulky sheepskin caps (chugirma) and cotton caftans.

The surviving lyrics of the dance were clearly prescribed by Persian-speaking musicians who either used Persian as a mother tongue or more likely, possessed a masterful command of the literary Persian language due to its historical prominence in Khorezm and Transoxiana as the medium of artists, literati and urban elites. The latter scenario is most probable in a Persianate society such as Khorezm, where in contrast to the oases of Bukhara, Samarqand, the Ferghana valley where Tajiks have always formed a majority, Khorezm never had a sizable Tajik population. Of note, according to multiple accounts in the mid to late-18th century, tens of thousands of Iranians were kidnapped and enslaved by marauding Turkmen tribes in Khorāsān who sold the slaves for profit in the infamous Khiva slave market, but this population was clearly assimilated.

Analysis of Lazgi Lyrics
Analysis of the introductory lyrics reveals that it is not Turkic at all, but pure Persian clauses:

“Ey omon omon, asiram asiram, benavoyam benavoyam, bekasam, giriftoram giriftor” (Persian: “Oh Lord have mercy! I am a serf, a serf; I am miserable, dejected; I am loveless. I am a captive, a captive.”)

Persianized Turkic would have employed at the very least Turkic clitics, yielding “asirman“, “benavomon“, “giriftormon“ etc. This suggests the lyrics were at least in part originally intended to be purely Persian. This is consistent with the role of Persian as the prestige language associated with sedentary refinement in Khorezm and Transoxiana for over a millennium. It is possible that through progressive generational acquisitions of the repertoire and as Persian gradually lost currency in the region in favor of Russian, perhaps the foundation of the lyrics was Turkified to improve intelligibility, while much of the vivid Persian imagery was fossilized. Contrarily, the original lyricists may have composed the lazgi in heavily Persianized Turkic–writing the introductory exclamations in pure Persian– a phenomenon which is consistent with the sociolinguistic prestige of Persian in Central Asia and the fact that musical modes and instruments (including the surnay used in lazgi) were adopted wholesale by Turkic nomads from the indigenous Iranian-speaking population in the process of their sedentarization in the region.

Nonetheless, the text version used for analysis in this article is comprised of a majority of Persian words (59%; 126/212), whilst only a minority are Turkic (41%). This Persian is of the literary register, rich and complex, with preserved morphosyntax such as the ezāfe (e.g. to’ti-yi shakar suxan meaning “sweet-spoken parrot” in Persian; akhtar-i tobanda meaning “radiant star”) and stylistic idiosyncracies of Persian poetry including paired nouns and adjectives (e.g. lola-vu gulnor “tulip and pomegranate flower”; dilbar-i gulru-vu siymin badan “The ruddy-faced and silvery-bodied beloved”). Notably, words of Arabic origin have been borrowed indirectly through the milieu of Persian–because they were considered to be Persian–and thus reflect Persian semantic and phonological modifications to the original Arabic lexica. This phenomenon was true in all Muslim territories in Western Asia, where almost uniformly Arabic was confined to the religious sphere while Persian was the favored medium for poetry, literature, fine arts, diplomacy and administration. Most interestingly, the meanings of the majority of these words are quite unintelligible to modern Turkic Khorezmian speakers, but their preservation suggests the retained social currency of Persianisms in the minds of ordinary people. Moreover, since a number of these Persianisms have not been incorporated into the Khorezmian vernacular and remain unintelligible to the audience, it is remarkable that such a large cache of foreign words should be selectively preserved.

Below a version² of the Lazgi lyrics in Khorezmian vernacular has been transcribed with Persian vocabulary (59% of total) boldened:

Qaysi falak burjining mehr-i puranvorison?
Qaysi sadaf durjining gavhar-i shahvorison? 
Qaysi Xo‘tan ohusi, nofayi totorison, 
Qaysi chamanzorning lola-vu gulnorison? 
So‘yla mongo, ey sanam, kimni sevar yorison? 

Qomatinga bandadur bog‘ aro sarv-i ravon, 
La’li labing rashkidin g‘uncha erur bag‘ri qon. 
Chunki chaman sahnida bo‘lsa yuzing gulfishon, 
Nolasin aylar fuzun bulbul-i bexonumon, 
So‘yla mongo, ey sanam, kimni sevar yorison?  
 
Yig‘latur oshiqlaring la’li labing xandasi, 
To‘bi-yu shamshod erur sarv qading bandasi
Husn-u jamol avjining mehr-i duraxshandasi (alternate lyrics: akhtar-i tobandasi)
Go‘rsa mahi orazing, bo‘lg‘usi sharmandasi
So‘yla mongo, ey sanam, kimni sevar yorison?  

Ey, yuzi husn-u jamol bog‘ining ahmar guli, 
Jon ila ko‘nglum erur ushbu guling bulbuli
Qumri-yi nolon erur sarv qadingning quli,
Yo‘q esa nechun oning bo‘ynida bordur g‘uli
So‘yla mango, ey sanam, kimni sevar yorisen?

Sen kibi bir dilbar-i gulru-vu siymin badan,
Vaqt-i takallum aro to‘ti-yi shakkar suxan
Majlis aro aylasang shu’bada-yi la’b fan
Vola o‘lurlar sango ahl-i zamon-u zaman
So‘yla mango, ey sanam, kimni sevar yorison?   

Aysh-u nashot istabon g‘amg‘a duchor o‘lmag‘on,
Mehringga dil basta-yi zor-u nizor o‘lmag‘on
La’li labing shahdig‘a bormu xumor o‘lmag‘on
Dahr aro yo‘qtur songo oshiq-i zor o‘lmag‘on, 
So‘yla mongo, ey sanam, kimni sevar yorison?   

Bir kecha aylab mongo mehr-u muhabbat ayon, 
Hamrah-u yo‘ldoshsiz borcha ulusdin nihon. 
Kulba-yi ahzonima bo‘lsang agar mehmon, 
Komil-i mahzuningga rostini etg‘il bayon, 
So‘yla mongo, ey sanam, kimni sevar yorison?

Sources:
1. https://uzjournals.edu.uz/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=ea_music
2. https://tafakkur.net/qaysi-falak-burjining-mehri-puranvorisen/muhammadniyoz-komil-xorazmiy.uz