Due to its natural isolation and limited infrastructure access, the people of Yaghnob Valley have been able to preserve their distinct lifestyle, culture and language, Yaghnobi, which is closely related to ancient Sogdian.

In 1990, after the Glasnost reforms, it became possible for the Tajik Cultural Fund to organize expeditions and the historian Oleg Panfilov published articles on the valley.

The ancient Sogdians, and their direct descendants, the Yaghnobi, continued to live for centuries in splendid isolation in their remote valley home, surviving the successive waves of invaders that destroyed the surrounding areas.

However, since then the government has largely ignored this issue and has made little effort to restore the necessary socio-economic conditions for durable life in the valley or otherwise redress the wrongs inflicted on this community.

Nevertheless, the overall trend appears downwards, as the younger people seem less inclined to remain in the valley, due to the paucity of health and educational facilities available locally.

[7] In 1989-1992, Anvar J. Buzurukov (as the head of the Protected Areas Department of the Ministry of the Environment) initiated, planned and led scientific feasibility studies towards establishing the first national and natural parks in the Tajik SSR.

Together with independent researchers, the expedition attempted to renew the initiatives to save and protect the valley's natural environment and the lifestyles and the language of its people.

They prepared a report entitled, A brief scientific feasibility study, with proposed pre-project activities, for establishing the Yaghnob Natural Ethnography Park (YNEP).

Plans for the YNEP were discussed and approved during the first international scientific conference on environmental and developmental issues in the Yaghnob Valley: Ancient Sogdiana: Past, Present and Future, which took place on the 18–19 October 2007 in Dushanbe in Tajikistan.

The Yaghnobi community, for its part, needed to play a more active role and become involved in all the subsequent initiatives, learning how to plan and implement the development projects themselves.