Uzbek language


Uzbek is a Karluk Turkic language spoken by Uzbeks. It is the official and national language of Uzbekistan and formally succeeded Chagatai, an earlier Karluk language endonymically called Türki or Türkçe, as the literary language of Uzbekistan in the 1920s.
According to the Ethnologue, Southern Uzbek and Standard Uzbek are spoken as a native language by more than 34 million people around the world, making Uzbek the second-most widely spoken Turkic language after Turkish. In addition to these native speakers, there are members of many other ethnic groups such as Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Russians who live in Uzbekistan and speak Uzbek as their second language.
There are two major variants of the Uzbek language: Northern Uzbek, or simply "Uzbek", spoken in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and China; and Southern Uzbek, spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both Northern and Southern Uzbek are divided into many dialects. Uzbek and Uyghur are sister languages and they constitute the Karluk or "Southeastern" branch of Turkic.
External influences on Uzbek include Arabic, Persian, and Russian. One of the most noticeable distinctions of Uzbek from other Turkic languages is the rounding of the vowel to under the influence of Persian. Unlike other Turkic languages, vowel harmony is almost completely lost in modern Standard Uzbek, though it is still observed to some degree in its dialects, as well as in Uyghur.
Different dialects of Uzbek show varying degrees of influence from other languages such as Kipchak and Oghuz Turkic as well as Persian, which gives literary Uzbek the impression of being a mixed language.
In February 2021, the Uzbek government announced that Uzbekistan plans to fully transition the Uzbek language from the Cyrillic script to a Latin-based alphabet by 1 January 2023. Similar deadlines had been extended several times., most institutions still use both alphabets.

Classification

Uzbek is the western member of the Karluk languages, a subgroup of Turkic; the eastern variant is Uyghur. Karluk is classified as a dialect continuum. Northern Uzbek was determined to be the most suitable variety to be understood by the most number of speakers of all Turkic languages despite it being heavily Persianized, excluding the Siberian Turkic languages. A high degree of mutual intelligibility found between certain specific Turkic languages has allowed Uzbek speakers to more easily comprehend various other distantly related languages.

Number of speakers

Uzbek, being the most widely spoken indigenous language in Central Asia, is as well spoken by smaller ethnic groups in Uzbekistan and in neighbouring countries.
The language is spoken by other ethnic groups outside Uzbekistan. The popularity of Uzbek media, including Uzbekfilm and RizanovaUz, has spread among the post-Soviet states, particularly in Central Asia in recent years. Since Uzbek is the dominant language in the Osh Region of Kyrgyzstan, like the rest of Eastern, Southern and South-Eastern Kyrgyzstan, the ethnic Kyrgyzes are, too, exposed to Uzbek, and some speak it fluently. This is a common situation in the rest of Central Asian republics, including: the Turkistan region of Kazakhstan, northern Daşoguz Welaýat of Turkmenistan, Sughd region and other regions of Tajikistan.
The Uzbek language has a special status in countries that are common destination for immigration for Uzbekistani citizens. Other than Uzbekistan and other Central Asian Republics, the ethnic Uzbeks most commonly choose the Russian Federation in search of work. Most of them however, are seasonal workers, whose numbers vary greatly among residency within the Russian Federation. According to Russian government statistics, 4.5 million workers from Uzbekistan, 2.4 million from Tajikistan, and 920,000 from Kyrgyzstan were working in Russia in 2021, with around 5 million being ethnic Uzbeks.
Estimates of the number of native speakers of Uzbek vary widely, from 35 up to 40 million. Ethnologue estimates put the number of native speakers at 33 million across all the recognized dialects. The Swedish national encyclopedia, Nationalencyklopedin, estimates the number of native speakers to be 38 million,
and the CIA World Factbook estimates 30 million. Other sources estimate the number of speakers of Uzbek to be 34 million in Uzbekistan, 4.5 million in Afghanistan, 1,630,000 in Pakistan, 1,500,000 in Tajikistan, about 1 million in Kyrgyzstan, 600,000 in Kazakhstan, 600,000 in Turkmenistan, and 300,000 in Russia.
The Uzbek language is taught in more than fifty higher education institutions around the world.

Etymology

Historically, the language under the name Uzbek referred to a totally different language of Kipchak origin. The language was generally similar to the neighbouring Kazakh, more or less identical lexically, phonetically and grammatically. It was dissimilar to the area's indigenous and native language, known as Turki, until it was changed to Chagatai by western scholars due to its origins from the Chagatai Khanate.
The ethnonym of the language itself now means "a language spoken by the Uzbeks."

History

Turkic speakers probably settled the Amu Darya, Syr Darya and Zarafshon river basins from at least 600–650 AD, gradually ousting or assimilating the speakers of the Eastern Iranian languages who previously inhabited Sogdia, Bactria and Khwarazm. The first Turkic dynasty in the region was that of the Kara-Khanid Khanate from the 9th–12th centuries, a confederation of Karluks, Chigils, Yagma, and other tribes.
Uzbek can be considered the direct descendant of Chagatai, the language of great Turkic Central Asian literary development in the realm of Chagatai Khan, Timur, and the Timurid dynasty. Chagatai contained large numbers of Persian and Arabic loanwords. By the 19th century, it was rarely used for literary composition and disappeared only in the early 20th century.
Muhammad Shaybani, the first Khan of Bukhara, wrote poetry under the pseudonym "Shibani". A collection of Chagatai poems by Muhammad Shaybani is currently kept in the Topkapı Palace Museum manuscript collection in Istanbul. The manuscript of his philosophical and religious work, Bahr al-Khudā, written in 1508, is located in London.
Shaybani's nephew Ubaydullah Khan skillfully recited the Quran and provided it with commentaries in Chagatai. Ubaydulla himself wrote poetry in Chagatai, Classical Persian, and Arabic under the literary pseudonym Ubaydiy.
For the Uzbek political elite of the 16th century, Chagatai was their native language. For example, the leader of the semi-nomadic Uzbeks, Sheibani Khan, wrote poems in Chagatai.
The poet Turdiy in his poems called for the unification of the divided Uzbek tribes: "Although our people are divided, but these are all Uzbeks of ninety-two tribes. We have different names – we all have the same blood. We are one people, and we should have one law. Floors, sleeves and collars – it's all – one robe, So the Uzbek people are united, may they be in peace."
Sufi Allayar was an outstanding theologian and one of the Sufi leaders of the Khanate of Bukhara. He showed his level of knowledge by writing a book called Sebâtü'l-Âcizîn. Sufi Allayar was often read and highly appreciated in Central Asia.
The term Uzbek as applied to language has meant different things at different times.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Chagatai remained the main literary language in most of Central Asia, but it faced a phase of decay. Eventually, Chagatai was mostly referred to as the language of the Sarts, the settled Turkic-speaking populations of the Fergana Valley, although the definition of this term shifted through the decades. According to the Kazakh scholar Serali Lapin, who lived at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century, "there is no special Sart language different from Uzbek". Russian researchers of the second half of the 19th century, like L. N. Sobolev, believed that "Sart is not a special tribe, as many tried to prove. Sart is indifferently called both Uzbek and Tajik, who live in the city and are engaged in trade".
As part of the preparation for the 1924 establishment of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, Chagatai was officially renamed "Old Uzbek", which Edward A. Allworth argued "badly distorted the literary history of the region" and was used to give authors such as Ali-Shir Nava'i an Uzbek identity.
After the independence of Uzbekistan, the Uzbek government opted to reform Northern Uzbek by changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin in an attempt to stimulate the growth of Uzbek in a new, independent state. However, the reform never went into full application, and as of 2025 both alphabets are widely used, from daily uses to government publications and TV news. The Uzbek language has not eclipsed Russian in the government sector since Russian is used widely in sciences, politics, and by the upper class of the country. However, the Uzbek internet, including Uzbek Wikipedia, is growing rapidly.

Writing systems

Uzbek has been written in a variety of scripts throughout history:
  • 1000–1920s: The traditional Arabic script, first in the Qarakhanid standard and next in the Chagatai standard. This is seen as the golden age of the Uzbek language and literary history.
  • 1920–1928: the Arabic-based Yaña imlâ alphabet.
  • 1928–1940: the Latin-based Yañalif was imposed officially.
  • 1940–1992: the Cyrillic script was used officially.
  • Since 1992: Switch back to Latin script, with heavy holdover usage of Cyrillic.
Despite the official status of the Latin script in Uzbekistan, the use of Cyrillic is still widespread, especially in advertisements and signs. In newspapers, scripts may be mixed, with headlines in Latin and articles in Cyrillic. The Arabic script is no longer used in Uzbekistan except symbolically in limited texts or for the academic studies of Chagatai.
In 2019, an updated version of the Uzbek Latin alphabet was revealed by the Uzbek government, with five letters being updated; it was proposed to represent the sounds "ts", "sh", "ch", "oʻ" and "gʻ" by the letters "c", "ş", "ç", "ó" and "ǵ", respectively. This would have reversed a 1995 reform, and brought the orthography closer to that of Turkish and also of Turkmen, Karakalpak, Kazakh and Azerbaijani. In 2021, it was proposed to change "sh", "ch", "oʻ" and "gʻ" to "ş", "ç", "ō" and "ḡ". These proposals were not implemented.
In the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, in northern Afghanistan and in Pakistan, where there is an Uzbek minority, the Arabic-based script is still used. In the early 21st century, in Afghanistan, standardization, publication of dictionaries, and an increase in usage has been taking place.
А аB bD dЕ еF fG g
H hI iJ jK kL lМ m
N nО оP pQ qR rS s
Т tU uV vX xY yZ z
Oʻ oʻGʻ gʻSh shCh chNg ng

А аБ бВ вГ гД дЕ еЁ ё
Ж жЗ зИ иЙ йК кЛ лМ м
Н нО оП пР рС сТ тУ у
Ф фХ хЦ цЧ чШ шЪ ъЬ ь
Э эЮ юЯ яЎ ўҚ қҒ ғҲ ҳ

ابپتثجچح
خدذرزژسش
صضطظعغفق
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