Uzbekistan's culture: one language in four alphabets

Which languages people speak at home

The census of January 2026 was the first since independence, and its preliminary results give the first full count of mother tongues in more than three decades. Uzbek, a Turkic language of the Karluk branch whose other member is Uyghur, is the state language under the constitution and the mother tongue of 91.3% of the population.

The census also shows where language and ethnicity part company. More people speak Uzbek and Russian as their first language than declare themselves Uzbek or Russian, and fewer speak Tajik, Kazakh, Kyrgyz or Turkmen:

The number of Tajiks is a contested figure. Official counts have put them at about 5% of the population and the 2026 census at 1,276,941, while some Western academics cited in the Wikipedia country article put the Tajik share at 25 to 30%. Tajik, a variety of Persian, is spoken in Samarkand and Bukhara and in pockets of the Fergana Valley, the Tashkent region and the south. Karakalpak, a Kipchak Turkic language closer to Kazakh, has official status in Karakalpakstan, where the census counted 844,002 people with it as their mother tongue.

Russian has no official status but is used widely in business and higher education, and Tashkent city alone holds 394,088 of the country's 787,493 native Russian speakers. The Wikipedia country article counts 862 Russian-language schools, against 1,100 in 1991. A draft law of April 2020 that would have fined officials for working in languages other than Uzbek did not pass, and since September 2020 applicants for citizenship must show proficiency in Uzbek.

Who else made the population what it is

The minorities the census counts are partly the work of Soviet policy. Russians arrived with the conquest and the railways, and the 1970 census counted nearly 1.5 million of them, 12.5% of the population; Russians and Ukrainians made up more than half of Tashkent in the Soviet period. In the 1930s and 1940s Moscow deported whole peoples to Central Asia: Koreans from the Soviet Far East in 1937 and 1938, then Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Volga Germans and Pontic Greeks. About 100,000 Crimean Tatars still live in the country, according to the Wikipedia country article. Most Meskhetian Turks left after the pogrom in the Fergana Valley in June 1989, and many Russians, Jews, Germans and Greeks emigrated after 1991. The census of 2026 counted 606,526 Russians.

The language of schooling changed with independence. Britannica records that in the late 1980s Uzbek replaced Russian as the main language of instruction, which made most schoolbooks, written in Russian, unusable and created a need for hundreds of thousands of copies of new ones, and that higher education followed with a switch to teaching in Uzbek.

How the written language was remade

How the alphabet kept changing

Until the 1920s Uzbeks wrote in the Arabic script, in the Chagatai literary language the Timurid court had made a vehicle for poetry; the Wikipedia article on the language calls this the golden age of its literature. An Arabic-based alphabet reformed for Uzbek was used from 1920, the Latin-based Yañalif was imposed in 1928, Cyrillic replaced it in 1940, and in 1992 independent Uzbekistan decided to return to Latin.

The return has not finished. The Latin alphabet was modified in the mid-1990s and has been taught in schools since 2000, and official documents no longer use Cyrillic. Yet Cyrillic remains common among older people and in advertising and signs, newspapers may set headlines in Latin and articles in Cyrillic, and in February 2021 the government set 1 January 2023 as a deadline for the full transition after earlier deadlines had been extended. As of 2024, according to the Wikipedia language article, most institutions still used both. Further reforms of the Latin letters were proposed in 2019 and 2021 and were not adopted.

What the writers left

Britannica traces the written culture to scholars and poets of the region's medieval cities: the encyclopaedist al-Biruni in the eleventh century, the astronomer Ulugh Beg in the fifteenth, and Ali-Shir Nava'i, who advanced Turkic-language literature in the late fifteenth century and whose tradition the writers of the twentieth century broke with in style while continuing to revere it.

The modern literature began with the Jadid reformers between about 1900 and 1920. Abdurauf Fitrat, Sadriddin Ayni and Abdullah Qadiri, all of them bilingual in Uzbek and Tajik, wrote many of the first modern plays and novels of Central Asia. Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy's tragedy Padarkush appeared in 1913, Fitrat's dialogue Munazara in 1909 and Qadiri's Days Gone By, the first Uzbek historical novel, between 1922 and 1926. Most of these writers died violently in the civil war or in Stalin's purges of the 1930s, and Britannica records that only since independence have they regained recognition. Until the 1980s most Soviet Uzbek authors wrote to Communist Party themes, and a younger generation born in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Rauf Parfi and Halima Khudayberdiy, wrote dramas and comedies for the theatre.

How faith is practised in a secular state

The 2023 constitution defines Uzbekistan as a secular state. Most of the population is Muslim, mostly Sunni: a Pew Research report of 2009 counted 96.3% of the population as Muslim, of whom 54% identified as non-denominational Muslims, 18% as Sunni and 1% as Shia, and 11% said they belonged to a Sufi order. Christians, mostly Russian Orthodox, were 2.3% in a Pew projection of 2020.

Soviet rule from 1924 to 1991 discouraged and repressed religious practice. Communist authorities turned many old mosques into garages, storehouses, shops and museums, and Britannica describes their reclamation and reconsecration since independence, and a surge of religious practice from the 1980s centred on the Fergana Valley. The state keeps a close watch on observance: Freedom House reported that in 2024 police detained young men with beards in markets and public spaces and made them shave or face up to 15 days in jail.

Bukharan Jews have lived in the region for centuries, and their community, which counted 94,900 people in the census of 1989, mostly left after the end of the Soviet Union; some 7,000 remained in Tashkent, 3,000 in Bukhara and 700 in Samarkand in 2013.

What the Shashmaqom carries

The classical music of Bukhara and Samarkand is the Shashmaqom, the "six maqoms", which UNESCO inscribed in 2008 as a tradition of the cities of what are now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. It joins vocal and instrumental music, melody, rhythm and poetry, and is performed by a singer or a group with an ensemble of lutes, fiddles, frame drums and flutes. UNESCO records that numerous music schools were founded in Bukhara in the ninth and tenth centuries, mainly by the Jewish community, and that because standard notation records only the basic framework, the music still passes orally from master to student. Britannica notes that television, radio and concert halls broadcast the maqom cycles in live performance.

What palov and the tea table mean

Palov, the rice dish also called plov or osh, is the dish around which hospitality is organised, and UNESCO inscribed its culture and tradition in 2016. UNESCO records a saying that guests may leave a host's house only after palov has been served, and lists the occasions it marks: weddings and the new year, help for people in need and the remembrance of the dead. It is cooked by men and women of any age, and its skills pass from master to apprentice and within families.

The dish is built on rice, meat, usually mutton, grated carrots and onions, fried in qurdiuq, the tail fat of the fat-tailed sheep, and cooked in a kazan over an open fire. The Wikipedia article on the cuisine records that an oshpaz, a master cook, may serve up to 1,000 people from a single cauldron at a wedding, and that nahor oshi, the morning plov, is served between 6 and 9 am to the guests of a wedding. The same article notes that palov was not available to ordinary people until the 1930s.

The rest of the table draws on wheat and sheep. Bread, non, is baked as round flat loaves in clay tandir ovens, each region with its own kind; noodle dishes such as lagman and norin, the stuffed doughs manti, chuchvara and somsa, and the soup shurpa complete it. Green tea is drunk through the day and offered to every guest, black tea is preferred in Tashkent, and both are taken without milk or sugar. The Khovrenko winery in Samarkand has made wine since 1927.

How houses turn inward to their courtyards

Most people live in houses of their own. The census of January 2026 counted 33,293,641 people in individual detached houses and 4,826,476 in apartments in multi-storey buildings. The traditional house looks inward: UNESCO describes the old houses of Samarkand as one or two storeys of mud brick grouped around a central courtyard with a garden, with painted wooden ceilings, and those of Khiva as enclosed houses with a courtyard, a reception room and a portico on carved wooden posts. Britannica notes that houses still built in the suburbs of Tashkent follow the same plan, low and set around courtyards planted with fruit trees and closed off from the street.

Tashkent itself was rebuilt after the earthquake of 1966, and ten of its modernist buildings and complexes from the 1960s to the early 1990s were inscribed by UNESCO in 2026 for adapting standard Soviet construction to the local climate, earthquakes and traditions.

What the crafts and the calendar hold

Silkworms have been raised since the fourth century, according to Britannica, fed on mulberry trees along streets and ditches, and the Fergana Valley is noted for its silk; the Wikipedia article on the economy lists Uzbek ikat among the country's silks. In Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan, the Savitsky Museum holds a collection of avant-garde art alongside regional collections.

The year turns twice. Yangi Yil, the new year of 1 January, is kept with a decorated tree, gifts and a figure of Father Time, and the national anthem is sung at midnight. Navruz, the spring festival, is described by the Wikipedia article on the culture as the more popular festival: people wear their best traditional clothes, the table is laid with many dishes, and the centre of it is sumalak, which has to be boiled through the night.

Which games and sports draw a following

Football draws the largest following, and Pakhtakor of Tashkent has won the national league ten times. Boxers from Uzbekistan won five gold medals at the 2024 Olympic Games. Chess has a large following: Uzbek teams won gold at the 44th Chess Olympiad in Chennai and at the 46th, held in Samarkand, and Javokhir Sindarov won the Candidates Tournament of 2026. Kurash, a modernised form of traditional Uzbek wrestling, is governed by an international association based in the country.