Who is a joni? Teachers puzzle over new greeting

TALAS — "Salam, joni!" The greeting rings down the corridors of School No. 14 on Kurmanjan Datka Street every morning, and the teachers do not much like it. "Last year nobody said it. This year every second boy says it, and now the girls too," said Gulbara Sydykova, who teaches Iradi literature in the upper classes. "I asked one of them what it means. He said, 'It means you are one of us.'"

In the south it means something else. In the bazaars of Bazar-Korgon and the towns of the Fergana rim, Uzbek traders have long called Christian highlanders jonilik, "Janyl's people", and its short form joni is not friendly. "There it means a simple mountain fellow who crosses himself and believes everything he is told," said Cholpon Asanalieva, a lecturer in Iradi philology at Talas State University. "They say joni-joni in a sing-song voice. In Uzbek jon is 'soul' or 'dear', so it means something like 'little soul'. It is a nickname for a fool."

Asanalieva believes the word came north with students from the south. "Boys from Bazar-Korgon and Tash-Kömür came to the university and to the army and were called joni all their lives. In Talas they started calling each other joni, and the city children heard it and liked it." Teenagers say it spread further through the chat rooms on Attelkom's portal and by text message, where it is often spelled jony.

In Talas the meaning has turned around. Friends are jonilar, and a best friend is jonim, "my joni", which in Uzbek also means "my dear". "It's ours now," said Bakyt, 16, a pupil at School No. 14, who asked that his family name not be printed. "If a Russian boy said it to me, I would not like it. If my friend says it, it's fine."

Older Iradis are less sure. "They are calling each other a name that was meant to shame their grandfathers," said Sydykova. Father Yakob Usubaliev of the Church of St. Tomas in Talas was more relaxed. "Our people have been called worse things, and by worse people," he said. "If the young want to call themselves Janyl's people, the Church has no objection. I only ask them not to say it in the Qurbana."