Uzbek language

• 1. Introduction

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  Uzbek is spoken by more than 34 million people across Central Asia, South Asia, and beyond, making it the second-most widely spoken Turkic language on earth after Turkish. Yet for most of its history, it was not even called Uzbek. The language that scholars now know by that name descended from Chagatai, a literary tongue once shared by the courts of Timur, the Timurid dynasty, and the early Mughal rulers of India. Poets composed in it, khans debated in it, theologians wrote their commentaries in it. Then, in a single bureaucratic act in the 1920s, Soviet officials renamed Chagatai "Old Uzbek," binding a centuries-old literary tradition to a new Soviet republic. What does it mean for a language to be born from a renaming? How does a tongue spoken from the Ferghana Valley to the suburbs of Moscow hold itself together across so many borders and scripts? And why, in 2021, did the government of Uzbekistan set a deadline of the 1st of January 2023 to abandon the Cyrillic alphabet entirely, only to find that deadline, like several before it, pass without full implementation?

• 2. Chagatai Roots

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  Muhammad Shaybani, born around 1451 and the first Khan of Bukhara, wrote poetry under the pseudonym "Shibani." A collection of his Chagatai poems is held today in the Topkapi Palace Museum manuscript collection in Istanbul. His philosophical and religious work, Bahr al-Khuda, written in 1508, survives in London. These are not fringe texts preserved by accident. They are artifacts of a living literary culture that thrived across what is now Uzbekistan for centuries.

  Shaybani's nephew Ubaydullah Khan, who lived from 1486 to 1540, was skilled enough in Chagatai to provide commentaries on the Quran in that language. He also wrote poetry in Classical Persian and Arabic under the literary pseudonym Ubaydiy. The Uzbek political elite of the 16th century used Chagatai as their native tongue; it was the prestige language of a region that stretched across the great cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

  Chagatai drew heavily from Persian and Arabic, absorbing loanwords at every level of vocabulary. By the 19th century, it was rarely used for literary composition, and it disappeared as a living literary language only in the early 20th century. The poet Turdiy, writing in the 17th century, had called for unity among the Uzbek tribes in that very tongue: "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." Sufi Allayar, an outstanding theologian of the Khanate of Bukhara who lived from 1633 to 1721, wrote in Chagatai as well, producing a work called Sebatul-Acizin that was widely read and highly appreciated across Central Asia.

• 3. The Soviet Renaming

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  Turkic speakers had been settling the basins of the Amu Darya, Syr Darya, and Zarafshon rivers from at least 600-650 AD. The first Turkic dynasty in the region was the Kara-Khanid Khanate, active from the 9th through the 12th centuries, a confederation that included Karluks, Chigils, and Yagma tribes.

  But the term "Uzbek" as applied to a language had never meant one stable thing. Historically, Uzbek referred to a Kipchak-origin language, closely related to Kazakh. The Chagatai tongue spoken by settled populations was distinct from this Kipchak Uzbek, with different phonology and no vowel harmony. The Kazakh scholar Serali Lapin, working at the turn of the 20th century, remarked that "there is no special Sart language different from Uzbek," while Russian researchers of the same era described "Sart" as a label applied indiscriminately to settled Uzbek and Tajik traders alike.

  As the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan was being established in 1924, administrators renamed Chagatai "Old Uzbek." Edward A. Allworth argued this decision "badly distorted the literary history of the region" and was used to give authors such as Ali-Shir Navai an Uzbek identity they had not claimed for themselves. The renaming folded centuries of shared Karluk literary culture into a national identity that had not previously existed in that form. The writers of Bukhara and Samarkand became, retroactively, Uzbek authors.

• 4. A Language Shaped by Contact

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  Standard Uzbek has six vowel phonemes, and one of the most telling marks of the language's history is what is missing from that vowel system. Vowel harmony, the principle found in most Turkic languages by which vowels in suffixes must match the vowels in the root, is almost entirely absent from modern Standard Uzbek. The cause is centuries of contact with Persian.

  Persian shaped Uzbek at every level. The vocabulary, phraseology, and pronunciation of Uzbek bear Persian's imprint most heavily. The dialect group centered on Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, and the Ferghana Valley, which forms the basis for the standard language, shows the strongest Persian vocabulary influence, particularly in the Tajik-dominated cities of Bukhara and Samarkand.

  Arabic arrived through Islam, leaving traces in loanwords related to religion, scholarship, and abstract concepts. Russian entered the vocabulary during the era of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, contributing words for technical and modern terms, everyday objects, and sociopolitical language. Uzbek also contains roughly 60 Mongolian loanwords, scattered across the names of birds and animals, household items, chemical elements, and military terms. The Kipchak dialects, spoken across north-central Uzbekistan into Karakalpakstan, show the influence of Kipchak Turkic languages in specific consonant shifts. The Oghuz dialects of Khorezm, near the Turkmenistan border, shift word-initial sounds in ways that reflect that border's proximity. Uzbek and Uyghur together form the Karluk or Southeastern branch of Turkic, and Northern Uzbek has been found to be the variety of Turkic most readily understood across the widest number of Turkic speakers, despite, or perhaps because of, its heavily Persianised character.

• 5. A Century of Shifting Scripts

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  From around 1000 AD through the 1920s, Uzbek was written in the Arabic script, first in the Qarakhanid standard and then in the Chagatai standard. Scholars and poets called this period the golden age of Uzbek literary history.

  Then the scripts began to change in rapid succession. A modified Arabic-based alphabet, the Yana imla, was used from 1920 to 1928. The Latin-based Yanalif was officially imposed from 1928 to 1940. The Cyrillic script replaced it and remained official from 1940 until 1992. After Uzbekistan's independence, the government switched back to a Latin-based alphabet.

  The practical result is that Uzbekistan today is a country that reads itself in two directions at once. Newspapers may carry headlines in Latin and articles in Cyrillic. Advertisements and signs skew heavily toward Cyrillic. The Arabic script survives only in limited symbolic uses and in academic study of Chagatai.

  In 2019, the government unveiled an updated Latin alphabet, proposing to change five letters to bring the orthography closer to Turkish, Turkmen, Karakalpak, and Azerbaijani. Those proposals were not implemented. In 2021, further revisions were proposed, and again not implemented. The 1st of January 2023 deadline for a full Cyrillic-to-Latin transition came and went, as similar deadlines had before it. In western China's Xinjiang region, northern Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Uzbek communities continue to use the Arabic script, while Afghanistan has in recent years seen a push toward standardization and dictionary publication in Uzbek.

• 6. Spread and Diaspora

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  Russian government statistics counted 4.5 million workers from Uzbekistan in Russia in 2021, with around 5 million ethnic Uzbeks in the country overall. Large diasporas live in cities like Saint Petersburg, where Uzbek-language signs appear on restaurants, barbershops, fruit shops, and at least one clinic.

  In Russia, Uzbeks tend to use the Cyrillic Uzbek alphabet, though younger Uzbeks have been shifting toward the Latin alphabet. Small Uzbek-language newspapers are published in major Russian cities. Russian universities in Moscow and Saint Petersburg host the largest Uzbek language learning centers in the country, and the language is studied in Turkology faculties across Russia.

  Beyond Russia, estimates of the total number of native speakers range from 30 million to 40 million depending on the source. One estimate puts 34 million speakers in Uzbekistan alone, with 4.5 million in Afghanistan, roughly 1.6 million in Pakistan, 1.5 million in Tajikistan, about 1 million in Kyrgyzstan, and 600,000 each in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. The Osh Region of Kyrgyzstan, including the city of Osh itself, is dominated by Uzbek speakers, and ethnic Kyrgyz in the region are widely exposed to the language.

  In Turkmenistan, the situation since the 2000s has been more constrained. The government pursued a forced Turkmenization of ethnic Uzbeks, reducing the number of Uzbek-language schools from several hundred to a handful and cutting Uzbek-language newspapers sharply. Uzbek retains formal recognition as a language of national minorities in Turkmenistan, but its public presence has contracted significantly. Uzbek media, including Uzbekfilm and RizanovaUz, has spread across post-Soviet Central Asia and maintained the language's cultural reach even where official support has weakened.