Spoken in: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Russia, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, USA.

Total speakers: 23.5 million.

Language family: Altaic (controversial), Turkic, Eastern Turkic, Uzbek.

Official status
Official language in: Uzbekistan.

Uzbek (O‘zbek tili in Latin script, ¡çáåê òèëè in Cyrillic script; أۇزبېك ﺗﻴﻠی in Arabic script) is an Eastern Turkic language and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has about 23.5 million native speakers, and it is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Uzbek belongs to the Qarluq family of Turkic languages, and consequently its lexicon and grammar are most closely linked to the Uighur language, while other influences rose from Persian, Arabic and Russian.


History

Turkic speakers have probably settled in the Amu-Darya, Syr-Darya and Zeravshan river basins since at least AD600-700, gradually ousting the speakers of Indo-Iranian languages who previously inhabited Soghdiana, Bactria and Chorasmia, or else changing their linguistic habits. The first Turkic dynasty in the region was that of the Karakhanids in the 9th- 12th centuries AD, who were a Qarluq tribe.

The Chagatai language championed by Mir Ali-Sher Nawa'i in the 15th & 16th centuries is widely held to be the ancestor of modern literary Uzbek. Ultimately based on the Qarluq variant of the Turkic languages, it contained large numbers of Persian and Arabic loan-words. By the 19th century it was rarely used for literary composition.

The term "Uzbek" as applied to language has meant different things at different times. Prior to 1921 "Uzbek" and "Sart" were considered to be different dialects; "Uzbek" was a vowel-harmonised Kipchak dialect (closely related to Kazakh) spoken by descendants of those who arrived in Transoxiana with Shaybani Khan in the 16th century, who lived mainly around Bukhara and Samarkand, although the Turkic spoken in Tashkent was also vowel-harmonised; "Sart" was a Qarluq dialect spoken by the older settled Turkic populations of the region in the Ferghana Valley and the Kashka-Darya region, and in some parts of the Samarkand Oblast; it contained a heavier admixture of Persian and Arabic, and did not use vowel-harmony. In Khiva Sarts spoke a form of highly Persianised Oghuz Turkic. After 1921 the Soviet regime abolished the term Sart as derogatory, and decreed that henceforth the entire settled Turkic population of Turkestan would be known as Uzbeks, even though many had no Uzbek tribal heritage. The standard written language that was chosen for the new republic in 1924, however, despite the protests of Uzbek Bolsheviks such as Faizullah Khojaev, was not pre-revolutionary "Uzbek" but the "Sart" language of the Samarkand region. All three dialects continue to exist within modern, spoken Uzbek.


Number of speakers

In the CIS countries, there are about 24.7 million people who speak dialects of Uzbek. In Uzbekistan, 21 million people speak Uzbek as their native language. There are about 1.2 million speakers in Tajikistan, 1 million in Afghanistan, 550,096 in Kyrgyzstan, 332,017 in Kazakhstan, and 317,333 in Turkmenistan. According to the 1990 census, about 3,000 people in Xinjiang (China) speak Uzbek.


Loan words

The influence of Islam, and by extension, Arabic, is evident in Uzbek, as well as the residual influence of Russian, from the time when Uzbekistan was under czarist and Soviet domination. Most of the Arabic words have found their way into Uzbek through Persian. Uzbek shares much Persian and Arabic vocabulary with neighboring languages such as Persian and its dialects (Tajik and Dari).

Dialects

The Uzbek language has many dialects, varying widely from region to region. However, there is a commonly understood dialect which is used in mass media and in most printed material. Some linguists consider the language spoken in northern Afghanistan by ethnic Uzbeks to be a dialect of Uzbek.


Writing systems

Before 1924, the Uzbek language, like most Central Asian languages, was written in various forms of the Arabic script by the few percent of populus who were literate. Between 1924 and 1940, as part of the comprehensive programmes to educate (and politically influence) the entire Uzbek people, who for the first time now had their own cartographically-delineated (administrative) region; the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, the new official Uzbek language was written, taught and enforced in the Latin script, before an enforced switch to Cyrillic under Stalin. Until 1992, Uzbek almost everywhere continued to be written using the Cyrillic alphabet, but now in Uzbekistan the Latin script has been officially re-introduced, although the use of Cyrillic is still widespread. The deadline in Uzbekistan for making this transition has been repeatedly changed. The latest deadline was 2005, but was shifted once again to provide a few more years.

Already education in many areas of in Uzbekistan is in the latin script, and in 2001 the latin script began being used for currency Since 2004 official websites have switched over to using the latin script when writing in Uzbek. Most street signs are also in the new latin script.

In the Xinjiang province of China, Uzbek has no official orthography. Some speakers write using the cyrillic script, others write using the Uyghur script--as that is the language they have gone to school in.