Soviet authorities officially renamed the language called Chagatai to Old Uzbek in the 1920s. This decision reshaped how scholars understood the history of Central Asia for decades.
Northern Uzbek serves as the standard variety used across Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and China. Southern Uzbek is spoken primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan while the Karluk dialect group centers on Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, and the Ferghana Valley.
From 1000 to the 1920s, the traditional Arabic script served as the standard before an Arabic-based Yaña imlâ alphabet replaced it between 1920 and 1928. The Latin-based Yañalif became official from 1928 until 1940 and Soviet authorities imposed Cyrillic writing officially between 1940 and 1992. Since 1992, the country has switched back to a Latin script while maintaining heavy usage of Cyrillic with plans announced in February 2021 to fully transition by the 1st of January 2023.
More than 34 million people speak Southern Uzbek and Standard Uzbek as their native language according to Ethnologue estimates. This makes Uzbek the second-most widely spoken Turkic language after Turkish with total native speaker estimates varying widely from 35 up to 40 million globally.
The word order follows a subject-object-verb pattern common to all Turkic languages while Standard Uzbek contains six vowel phonemes that function differently than in many other Turkic languages. Unlike its relatives, modern Standard Uzbek has lost almost all vowel harmony though dialects retain some degree of it and words usually carry stress on the last syllable known as oxytones.