Uzbek
Language · official in 2 countries and territories
Uzbek has lost almost all of the vowel harmony that other Turkic languages keep, after long contact with Persian, and it rounds /ɑ/ to /ɒ/. In the 1920s it took over from Chagatai as the literary language of Uzbekistan. It is official in 2 countries on record, as the official and national language of Uzbekistan and regionally in Afghanistan.
The language on record
- Own name
- o‘zbek
- ISO 639-1
- UZ
- ISO 639-3
- UZB
- Script
- Latin
- Family
- Karluk
- Official in
- 2 countries
Where Uzbek is official
Uzbekistan, where Uzbek is the official and national language, and Afghanistan, whose Southern Uzbek speakers see it made official in the northern areas where they are the majority.
Official beside Uzbek
About Uzbek
How the name Uzbek changed its meaning
The name once belonged to a different language, a Kipchak Turkic speech close to Kazakh, spoken by the descendants of groups who arrived in Transoxiana, mainly around Bukhara and Samarkand. The older settled Turkic population of the Fergana Valley and Qashqadaryo, the Sarts, spoke Chagatai, a Karluk language heavy with Persian and Arabic loans and without vowel harmony. When the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan was prepared in 1924, Chagatai was renamed Old Uzbek. Edward Allworth argued that the renaming badly distorted the literary history of the region. Uzbek and Uyghur are now counted as the direct descendants of Chagatai and form the Karluk branch together.
The standard rests on the Karluk dialects of Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and the Fergana Valley, the group most marked by Persian. Kipchak dialects run from Surxondaryo into Karakalpakstan, and an Oghuz dialect is spoken in Khorezm on the Turkmen border.
Why Uzbekistan still prints two alphabets
Uzbek was written in Arabic script until the 1920s, in the Latin Yañalif from 1928, in Cyrillic from 1940 and in Latin again from 1992. The switch was never completed. In February 2021 the government set 1 January 2023 as the date for a full move to Latin, after earlier deadlines had been extended, and in 2024 most institutions still used both. Newspapers sometimes set headlines in Latin and articles in Cyrillic. Proposals in 2019 and 2021 to bring the Latin letters closer to Turkish spelling were not carried out.
Where Southern Uzbek keeps the Arabic script
Southern Uzbek is the variety of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and there, as in Xinjiang, Uzbek is still written in Arabic script. In the early 21st century Afghan Uzbek gained dictionaries, a measure of standardisation and more use in news media. An estimate for 2020 put Uzbek speakers at 11% of Afghanistan's population. The government in power since 2021 has kept the regional status of minority languages on paper, and has been accused of restricting Uzbek in favour of Pashto.
Common questions
Questions about Uzbek
Which alphabet does Uzbek use today?
Latin is official in Uzbekistan and has been since 1992, but Cyrillic is still widespread on signs, in advertising and in the press. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Xinjiang Uzbek is written in Arabic script.
How close are Uzbek and Uyghur?
Sister languages. Together they make up the Karluk branch of Turkic, Uzbek to the west and Uyghur to the east.
What was Chagatai?
The Karluk literary language of Central Asia under the Timurids, full of Persian and Arabic vocabulary. It declined in the 18th and 19th centuries and had disappeared by the early 20th, when Uzbek replaced it.