Uyghur language

Classification

The Uyghur language belongs to the Karluk Turkic (Qarluq) branch of the Turkic language family. It is closely related to Äynu, Lop, Ili Turki, the extinct language Chagatay (the East Karluk languages), and more distantly to Uzbek (which is West Karluk).

Dialects

It is widely accepted that Uyghur has three main dialects, all based on their geographical distribution. Each of these main dialects have a number of sub-dialects which all are mutually intelligible to some extent.

• Central: Spoken in an area stretching from Kumul southward to Yarkand
• Southern: Spoken in an area stretching from Guma eastward to Qarkilik
• Eastern: Spoken in an area stretching from Qarkilik northward to Qongköl. The Lop dialect (also known as Lopluk) that falls under the Eastern dialect of the Uighur language is classified as a critically endangered language. It is spoken by less than 0.5% of the overall Uighur speakers population but has tremendous values in comparative research.

The Central dialects are spoken by 90% of the Uyghur-speaking population, while the two other branches of dialects only are spoken by a relatively small minority.

Vowel reduction is common in the northern parts of where Uyghur is spoken, but not in the south.

Status

Uyghur is spoken by an estimated 8–11 million people in total. In addition to being spoken primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China, mainly by the Uyghur people, Uyghur was also spoken by some 300,000 people in Kazakhstan in 1993, some 90,000 in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in 1998, 3,000 in Afghanistan and 1,000 in Mongolia, both in 1982. Smaller communities also exist in Albania, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Tajikistan, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States (New York City).

The Uyghurs are one of the 56 recognized ethnic groups in China and Uyghur is one of the two linguae francae of Xinjiang, along with Standard Chinese. As a result, Uyghur can be heard in most social domains in Xinjiang and also in schools, government and courts. Of the other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, those populous enough to have their own autonomous prefectures, such as the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz, have access to schools and government services in their native language. Smaller minorities, however, do not have a choice and must attend Uyghur-medium schools. These include the Xibe, Tajiks, Daurs and Russians.

Early in the era of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Uyghurs could choose between two separate secular school systems, one conducted in their own language and one offering instructions only in Chinese. Many Uyghurs linked the preservation of their cultural and religious identity with the language of instruction in schools and therefore preferred Uyghur language schools. During the 1980s the Chinese government pursued a new policy of cultural liberalization in Xinjiang and adopted a flexible language policy nationally. Despite a positive response among party officials and minority groups, the policy was viewed as unsuccessful and from the mid-1980s its official pluralistic language policy became increasingly subordinate to a covert policy of minority assimilation motivated by geopolitical concerns. Consequently, and in Xinjiang particularly, multilingualism and cultural pluralism were restricted to favor a "monolingual, monocultural model". In 2000, a special senior-secondary boarding school program for Uyghurs, the Xinjiang Class, with course work conducted entirely in Chinese was established. In 2002, Xinjiang University, originally a bilingual institution, had ceased offering courses in the Uyghur language. From 2004 onward, the government policy has been that classes should be conducted in Chinese as much as possible and in some selected regions, instruction in Chinese began in the first grade. By the 2010s, the Chinese government had implemented bi-lingual education in most regions of Xinjiang. The primary medium of instruction is Standard Chinese, with only a few hours a week devoted to Uyghur literature. The bi-lingual education system teaches Xinjiang's students all STEM classes using only Chinese, or a combination of Uyghur and Chinese. However, research has shown that due to differences in the order of words and grammar between the Uyghur and the Chinese language, many students face obstacles in learning courses such as Mathematics under the bi-lingual education system. Despite this policy, few Han children are taught to speak Uyghur. By the late 2010s, more Uyghur students were attending residential schools far from their home communities where they are not able to speak Uyghur, thus making the language vulnerable to extinction according to some. In 2020, a monolingual Chinese language education is known to have been introduced as an option in an influential high school in Kashgar that formerly provided bilingual education.

Uyghur has been described as an endangered language by the language institute INALCO in 2021.

Uyghur language has been supported by Google Translate since February 2020.

About 80 newspapers and magazines are available in Uyghur; five TV channels and ten publishers serve as the Uyghur media.

Outside of China, Radio Free Europe used to broadcast a 15-minute daily Uyghur language program from the late 1960s until 1979, when it was shut down by order of then-national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in an effort to enlist China's support against the Soviet Union. Radio Free Asia began its Uyghur-language service in 1998, and was shut down by the Trump administration in 2025 due to spending cuts.

Poet and activist Muyesser Abdul'ehed teaches the language to diaspora children online as well as publishes a magazine written by children for children in Uyghur.

Phonology

Vowels

Uyghur has a seven-vowel inventory, with and not distinguished. The vowel letters of the Uyghur language are, in their alphabetical order (in the Latin script), ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨ë⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨ü⟩. There are no diphthongs. Hiatus occurs in some loanwords.
Uyghur vowels are distinguished on the bases of height, backness and roundness. It has been argued, within a lexical phonology framework, that has a back counterpart , and modern Uyghur lacks a clear differentiation between and .

Uyghur vowels are by default short, but long vowels also exist because of historical vowel assimilation (above) and through loanwords. Underlyingly long vowels would resist vowel reduction and devoicing, introduce non-final stress, and be analyzed as |Vj| or |Vr| before a few suffixes. However, the conditions in which they are actually pronounced as distinct from their short counterparts have not been fully researched.

The high vowels undergo some tensing when they occur adjacent to alveolars (), palatals (), dentals (), and post-alveolar affricates (), e.g. chiraq 'lamp', jenubiy 'southern', yüz 'face; hundred', suda 'in/at (the) water'.

Both and undergo apicalisation after alveodental continuants in unstressed syllables, e.g. siler 'you (plural)', ziyan 'harm'. They are medialised after or before , e.g. til 'tongue', xizmet 'work; job; service'. After velars, uvulars and they are realised as , e.g. giram 'gram', xelqi 'his [etc.] nation', Finn 'Finn'. Between two syllables that contain a rounded back vowel each, they are realised as back, e.g. qolimu 'also his [etc.] arm'.

Any vowel undergoes laxing and backing when it occurs in uvular () and laryngeal (glottal) () environments, e.g. qiz 'girl', qëtiq 'yogurt', qeghez 'paper', qum 'sand', qolay 'convenient', qan 'blood', ëghiz 'mouth', hisab 'number', hës 'hunch', hemrah 'partner', höl 'wet', hujum 'assault', halqa 'ring'.

Lowering tends to apply to the non-high vowels when a syllable-final liquid assimilates to them, e.g. kör 'look!', boldi 'he [etc.] became', ders 'lesson', tar 'narrow'.

Official Uyghur orthographies do not mark vowel length, and also do not distinguish between (e.g., بىلىم‎ 'knowledge') and back (e.g., تىلىم‎ 'my language'); these two sounds are in complementary distribution, but phonological analyses claim that they play a role in vowel harmony and are separate phonemes. only occurs in words of non-Turkic origin and as the result of vowel raising.

Uyghur has systematic vowel reduction (or vowel raising) as well as vowel harmony. Words usually agree in vowel backness, but compounds, loans, and some other exceptions often break vowel harmony. Suffixes surface with the rightmost [back] value in the stem, and are transparent (as they do not contrast for backness). Uyghur also has rounding harmony.

Consonants

Uyghur voiceless stops are aspirated word-initially and intervocalically. The pairs , , , and alternate, with the voiced member devoicing in syllable-final position, except in word-initial syllables. This devoicing process is usually reflected in the official orthography, but an exception has been recently made for certain Perso-Arabic loans. Voiceless phonemes do not become voiced in standard Uyghur.

Suffixes display a slightly different type of consonant alternation. The phonemes and anywhere in a suffix alternate as governed by vowel harmony, where occurs with front vowels and with back ones. Devoicing of a suffix-initial consonant can occur only in the cases of → , → , and → , when the preceding consonant is voiceless. Lastly, the rule that /g/ must occur with front vowels and with back vowels can be broken when either or in suffix-initial position becomes assimilated by the other due to the preceding consonant being such.

Loan phonemes have influenced Uyghur to various degrees. and were borrowed from Arabic and have been nativized, while from Persian less so. only exists in very recent Russian and Chinese loans, since Perso-Arabic (and older Russian and Chinese) became Uyghur . Perso-Arabic loans have also made the contrast between and phonemic, as they occur as allophones in native words, the former set near front vowels and the latter near back vowels. Some speakers of Uyghur distinguish from in Russian loans, but this is not represented in most orthographies. Other phonemes occur natively only in limited contexts, i.e. only in few interjections, , , and rarely initially, and only morpheme-final. Therefore, the pairs , , and do not alternate.

Phonotactics

The primary syllable structure of Uyghur is CV(C)(C). Uyghur syllable structure is usually CV or CVC, but CVCC can also occur in some words. When syllable-coda clusters occur, CC tends to become CVC in some speakers especially if the first consonant is not a sonorant. In Uyghur, any consonant phoneme can occur as the syllable onset or coda, except for which only occurs in the onset and , which never occurs word-initially. In general, Uyghur phonology tends to simplify phonemic consonant clusters by means of elision and epenthesis.

Orthography

The Karluk language started to be written with the Perso-Arabic script (Kona Yëziq) in the 10th century upon the conversion of the Kara-Khanids to Islam. This Perso-Arabic script (Kona Yëziq) was reformed in the 20th century with modifications to represent all Modern Uyghur sounds including short vowels and eliminate Arabic letters representing sounds not found in Modern Uyghur. Unlike many other modern Turkic languages, Uyghur is primarily written using a Perso-Arabic-based alphabet, although a Cyrillic alphabet and two Latin alphabets also are in use to a much lesser extent. Unusually for an alphabet based on the Arabic script, full transcription of vowels is indicated. (Among the Arabic family of alphabets, only a few, such as Kurdish, distinguish all vowels without the use of optional diacritics.)

The four alphabets in use today can be seen below.

• Uyghur Arabic alphabet or UEY
• Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet or USY
• The Uyghur New Script or UYY
• Uyghur Latin alphabet or ULY

In the table below the alphabets are shown side-by-side for comparison, together with a phonetic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Grammar

Like other Turkic languages, Uyghur is a head-final agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case, but not gender and definiteness like in many other languages. There are two numbers: singular and plural and six different cases: nominative, accusative, dative, locative, ablative and genitive. Verbs are conjugated for tense: present and past; voice: causative and passive; aspect: continuous and mood: e.g. ability. Verbs may be negated as well.

Lexicon

The core lexicon of the Uyghur language is of Turkic stock, but due to different kinds of language contact throughout its history, it has adopted many loanwords. Kazakh, Uzbek and Chagatai are all Turkic languages which have had a strong influence on Uyghur. Many words of Arabic origin have come into the language through Persian and Tajik, which again have come through Uzbek and to a greater extent, Chagatai. Many words of Arabic origin have also entered the language directly through Islamic literature after the introduction of Islam around the 10th century.

Chinese in Xinjiang and Russian elsewhere had the greatest influence on Uyghur. Loanwords from these languages are all quite recent, although older borrowings exist as well, such as borrowings from Dungan, a Mandarin language spoken by the Dungan people of Central Asia. A number of loanwords of German origin have also reached Uyghur through Russian.

Code-switching with Chinese is common in spoken Uyghur, but stigmatized in formal contexts. Xinjiang Television and other mass media, for example, will use the rare Russian loanword aplisin (апельсин, apel'sin) for the word "orange", rather than the ubiquitous Chinese loanword juze (橘子; júzi). In a sentence, this mixing might look like:

مېنىڭ

Më-ning

1sg-GEN

تەلەفونىم

telfon-im

cellphone-POSS.1sg

گۇئەنجى،

guenji,

shut.down,

شۇڭا

shunga

so

سىزگە

siz-ge

2sg-DAT

دۇئەنشىن

duenshin

text.message

ئەۋەتەلمىدىم.

ewet-elmi-dim.

send-CAP.NEG-PST.1sg

My (cell) phone shut down (关机; guānjī), so I wasn't able to send you a text message (短信; duǎnxìn).

Below are some examples of common loanwords in the Uyghur language.

Sample text

The following is a sample text in Uyghur of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with an English translation.