Hazaras

The Hazaras (Persian: هزاره) are a Persian-speaking people who mainly live in central Afghanistan, Hazara Town in Balochistan, Pakistan and Karachi. They are overwhelmingly Twelver Shia Muslims and make up the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

The dialect of Persian which they speak is called Hazaragi, which is more precisely a part of the Dari dialect continuum (one of the two main languages of Afghanistan), and is mutually intelligible with Dari.

Etymology

Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire in the early 16th century, records the name Hazara in his autobiography. He referred to the populace of a region called Hazaristan, located west of the Kabulistan region, north of Ghazna and south-west of Ghor.

The conventional theory is that the word Hazara derives from the Persian word for Thousand (Persian: هزار‎‎ - hazār). It may be the translation of the Mongol word ming (or minggan), a military unit of 1,000 soldiers at the time of Gengis Khan. With time, the term Hazar could have been substituted for the Mongol word and now stands for the group of people.