Uzbek language

Number of speakers

Uzbek, being the most widely spoken indigenous language in Central Asia, is as well spoken by smaller ethnic groups in Uzbekistan and in neighbouring countries.

The language is spoken by other ethnic groups outside Uzbekistan. The popularity of Uzbek media, including Uzbekfilm and RizanovaUz, has spread among the post-Soviet states, particularly in Central Asia in recent years. Since Uzbek is the dominant language in the Osh Region of Kyrgyzstan (and mothertongue of the city Osh), like the rest of Eastern, Southern and South-Eastern Kyrgyzstan (Jalal-Abad Region), the ethnic Kyrgyz are, too, exposed to Uzbek, and some speak it fluently. This is a common situation in the rest of Central Asian republics, including: the Turkistan region of Kazakhstan, northern Daşoguz Welaýat of Turkmenistan, Sughd region and other regions of Tajikistan.

The Uzbek language has a special status in countries that are common destination for immigration for Uzbekistani citizens. Other than Uzbekistan and other Central Asian Republics, the ethnic Uzbeks most commonly choose the Russian Federation in search of work. Most of them however, are seasonal workers, whose numbers vary greatly among residency within the Russian Federation. According to Russian government statistics, 4.5 million workers from Uzbekistan, 2.4 million from Tajikistan, and 920,000 from Kyrgyzstan were working in Russia in 2021, with around 5 million being ethnic Uzbeks.

Estimates of the number of native speakers of Uzbek vary widely, from 35 up to 40 million. Ethnologue estimates put the number of native speakers at 33 million across all the recognized dialects. The Swedish national encyclopedia, Nationalencyklopedin, estimates the number of native speakers to be 38 million, and the CIA World Factbook estimates 30 million. Other sources estimate the number of speakers of Uzbek to be 34 million in Uzbekistan, 4.5 million in Afghanistan, 1.63 million in Pakistan, 1.5 million in Tajikistan, about 1 million in Kyrgyzstan, 600,000 in Kazakhstan, 600,000 in Turkmenistan, and 300,000 in Russia.

The Uzbek language is taught in more than fifty higher education institutions around the world.

Etymology

Historically, the language under the name Uzbek referred to a totally different language of Kipchak origin. The language was generally similar to the neighbouring Kazakh, more or less identical lexically, phonetically and grammatically. It was dissimilar to the area's indigenous and native language, known as Turki, until it was changed to Chagatai by western scholars due to its origins from the Chagatai Khanate. The ethnonym of the language itself now means "a language spoken by the Uzbeks."

History

Turkic speakers probably settled the Amu Darya, Syr Darya, and Zarafshon river basins from at least 600–650 AD, gradually ousting or assimilating the speakers of the Eastern Iranian languages who had previously inhabited Sogdia, Bactria, and Khwarazm. The first Turkic dynasty in the region was the Kara-Khanid Khanate from the 9th to the 12th centuries, a confederation of Karluks, Chigils, Yagma, and other tribes.

Uzbek (along with Uyghur) can be considered the direct descendant of Chagatai, the language of great Turkic Central Asian literary development in the realm of Chagatai Khan, Timur (Tamerlane), and the Timurid dynasty (including the early Mughal rulers of the Mughal Empire). Chagatai contained a large number of Persian and Arabic loanwords. By the 19th century, it was rarely used for literary composition and had disappeared by the early 20th century.

Muhammad Shaybani (c. 1451 – 2 December 1510), the first Khan of Bukhara, wrote poetry under the pseudonym 'Shibani'. A collection of Chagatai poems by Muhammad Shaybani is currently held in the Topkapı Palace Museum manuscript collection in Istanbul. The manuscript of his philosophical and religious work, Bahr al-Khudā, written in 1508, is located in London.

Shaybani's nephew Ubaydullah Khan (1486–1540) recited the Quran skilfully and provided it with commentaries in Chagatai. Ubaydullah himself wrote poetry in Chagatai, Classical Persian, and Arabic under the literary pseudonym Ubaydiy.

For the Uzbek political elite of the 16th century, Chagatai was their native language. For example, the leader of the semi‑nomadic Uzbeks, Sheibani Khan (1451–1510), wrote poems in Chagatai.

The poet Turdiy (17th century) in his poems called for the unification of the divided Uzbek tribes: "Although our people are divided, these are all Uzbeks of ninety‑two tribes. We have different names – we all have the same blood. We are one people, and we should have one law. Sleeves, collars, and floors – it is all one robe. So the Uzbek people are united, may they be at peace."

Sufi Allayar (1633–1721) was an outstanding theologian and one of the Sufi leaders of the Khanate of Bukhara. He demonstrated his level of knowledge by writing a book entitled Sebâtü'l-Âcizîn. Sufi Allayar was widely read and highly appreciated in Central Asia.

The term Uzbek as applied to language has meant different things at different times:

• Uzbek was a vowel‑harmonised Kipchak language spoken by descendants of those who arrived in Transoxiana and who lived mainly around Bukhara and Samarkand.
• Chagatai was a Karluk language spoken by the older settled Turkic populations ('Sarts') of the region in the Fergana Valley and the Qashqadaryo Region, and in some parts of what is now the Samarqand Region; it contained a heavier admixture of Persian and Arabic and did not have vowel harmony.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, Chagatai remained the main literary language in most of Central Asia, but it underwent a period of decline. Eventually, Chagatai was mostly referred to as the language of the Sarts, the settled Turkic‑speaking populations of the Fergana Valley, although the definition of this term shifted over the decades. According to the Kazakh scholar Serali Lapin, who lived at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, "there is no special Sart language different from Uzbek". Russian researchers of the second half of the 19th century, such as L. N. Sobolev, believed that "Sart is not a special tribe, as many have tried to prove. Sart is indifferently applied to both Uzbeks and Tajiks who live in the city and are engaged in trade".

As part of the preparations for the 1924 establishment of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, Chagatai was officially renamed 'Old Uzbek', which Edward A. Allworth argued "badly distorted the literary history of the region" and was used to give authors such as Ali-Shir Nava'i an Uzbek identity.

After Uzbekistan's independence, the Uzbek government opted to reform Northern Uzbek by changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin in an attempt to stimulate the growth of Uzbek in the new independent state. However, the reform was never fully implemented, and as of 2025, both alphabets are widely used, from daily life to government publications and television news. Uzbek has not eclipsed Russian in the governmental sector, as Russian remains widely used in science, politics, and by the upper class of the country. However, the Uzbek internet, including the Uzbek Wikipedia, is growing rapidly.

Writing systems

Uzbek has been written in a variety of scripts throughout history:

• 1000–1920s: The traditional Arabic script, first in the Qarakhanid standard and next in the Chagatai standard. This is seen as the golden age of the Uzbek language and literary history.
• 1920–1928: the Arabic-based Yaña imlâ alphabet.
• 1928–1940: the Latin-based Yañalif was imposed officially.
• 1940–1992: the Cyrillic script was used officially.
• Since 1992: Switch back to Latin script, with heavy holdover usage of Cyrillic.

Despite the official status of the Latin script in Uzbekistan, the use of Cyrillic is still widespread, especially in advertisements and signs. In newspapers, scripts may be mixed, with headlines in Latin and articles in Cyrillic. The Arabic script is no longer used in Uzbekistan except symbolically in limited texts or for the academic studies of Chagatai (Old Uzbek).

In 2019, an updated version of the Uzbek Latin alphabet was revealed by the Uzbek government, with five letters being updated; it was proposed to represent the sounds "ts", "sh", "ch", "oʻ" and "gʻ" by the letters "c", "ş", "ç", "ó" and "ǵ", respectively. This would have reversed a 1995 reform, and brought the orthography closer to that of Turkish and also of Turkmen, Karakalpak, Kazakh (2018 version) and Azerbaijani. In 2021, it was proposed to change "sh", "ch", "oʻ" and "gʻ" to "ş", "ç", "ō" and "ḡ". These proposals were not implemented.

In the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, in northern Afghanistan and in Pakistan, where there is an Uzbek minority, the Arabic-based script is still used. In the early 21st century, in Afghanistan, standardization, publication of dictionaries, and an increase in usage (for example in news agencies' websites, such as that of the BBC) has been taking place.

Phonology

Words are usually stressed on the last syllable with the exception of some suffixal particles, which are not stressed. Consonants in brackets are only attested in loanwords.

Vowels

Standard Uzbek has six vowel phonemes. Uzbek language has many dialects: contrary to many Turkic languages, Standard Uzbek has completely lost vowel harmony due to Persian influence, but other dialects (Kipchak Uzbek and Oghuz Uzbek) retain it.

• Around uvular consonants:
  • // goes back to .
  • // goes back to .
  • // goes back to .
• Elsewhere:
  • // is pronounced .
  • // may be shortened to .
  • // may be shortened to .
• Despite the Uzbek language no longer having vowel harmony, some local varieties geographically close to other Turkic languages who do (like Kazakh, Turkmen and Kyrgyz) may display it:
  • // goes back to around back vowels or uvular consonants, e.g., soya سایه 'shadow' ~ .
  • // goes back to around back vowels or uvular consonants, e.g., yaxshi یخشی 'good' .
  • // may be fronted to around front vowels or , e.g., salom alaykum سلام علیکم 'Peace be upon you' .
  • // may be fronted to around front vowels or , e.g., Oʻzbekiston اوزبیکستان 'Uzbekistan' .

Consonants

1. In word-final position and preconsonantally, is an affricate ; elsewhere, it is a pre-uvular plosive .

Grammar

As a Turkic language, Uzbek is null subject, agglutinative and has no noun classes (gender or otherwise). Although Uzbek has no definite articles, it has indefinite articles bir بِیر and bitta بِیتَّه. Like other Turkic languages, nouns only conjugate as "definite" in the accusative case. An indefinite direct object is conjugated in the nominative case. The word order is subject–object–verb (SOV).

In Uzbek, there are two main categories of words: nominals (equivalent to nouns, pronouns, adjectives and some adverbs) and verbals (equivalent to verbs and some adverbs).

Nouns

Plurals are formed by suffix -lar ـلر. Nouns take the -ni ـنی suffix as a definite article when they are direct objects; unsuffixed nouns are understood as indefinite. The dative case ending -ga ـگه changes to -ka ـکه when the noun ends in -k ـک, -g ـگ, or -qa ـقه when the noun ends in -q ـق, -gʻ ـغ (note *togʻqa > toqqa تاغقَّه). The possessive suffixes change the final consonants -k ـک and -q ـق to voiced -g ـگ and -gʻ ـغ, respectively (yurak یورک > yuragim یورگیم). Unlike neighbouring Turkmen and Kazakh languages, due to the loss of "pronominal -n-" there is no irregularity in forming cases after possessive cases (uyida اویی‌ده "in his/her/its house", as opposed to Turkmen öýünde اؤیۆنده, though saying uyinda اویینده is also correct, but such style is mainly used in literary contexts).

Verbs

Uzbek verbs are also inflected for number and person of the subject, and it has more periphrases. Uzbek uses some of the inflectional (simple) verbal tenses:

Copula verb

Conjugations of the verb ermoq ('to be'), with the exception of the future tense, serve as copula verbs. The future conjugation of ermoq (Old Turkic ergäy) is not present in Uzbek.

Negation

Negative is expressed by adding -ma after the verb root, or with auxiliary verb emas. Examples:

Koʻrmay(man) کورمه‌ی(من) "(I) don't see"

Koʻrmoqchi emas(man) کورماقچی ایمس(من) "(I) don't want to see"

The particle yoʻq ـیوق is used to mark the absence or prohibition of a noun or action.

Gerund

The gerund is formed with the verb root + -ish ـیش.

Chekish mumkin emas چیکیش ممکن ایمس "Smoking is not allowed"

Pronouns

Word order

The word order in the Uzbek language is subject–object–verb (SOV), like all other Turkic languages. Unlike in English, the object comes before the verb and the verb is the last element of the sentence.

Men

مین

1SG

kitobni

کتاب‌نی

book-DO.SG.ACC

koʻrdim

کوردیم

see-PAST.IND.1SG

I saw the book

Influences

The influence of Islam, and by extension Arabic, is evident in Uzbek loanwords. There is also a residual influence of Russian, dating from the period when Uzbeks were under the rule of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. A large number of Russian loanwords exist in Uzbek, particularly in relation to technical and modern terms, as well as everyday and sociopolitical vocabulary. Most importantly, Uzbek vocabulary, phraseology, and pronunciation have been heavily influenced by Persian through its historic roots. It is estimated that Uzbek contains about 60 Mongolian loanwords, scattered among the names of birds and other animals, household items, chemical elements, and especially military terms.

Dialects

Uzbek can be roughly divided into three dialect groups. The Karluk dialects, centred on Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, and the Ferghana Valley, form the basis of the standard Uzbek language. This dialect group shows the greatest influence of Persian vocabulary, particularly in the Tajik‑dominated cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. The Kipchak dialect, spoken from the Surxondaryo region through north‑central Uzbekistan into Karakalpakstan, shows significant influence from the Kipchak Turkic languages, particularly in the mutation of [j] to [ʑ] as in Kazakh and Kyrgyz. The Oghuz dialect, spoken mainly in Khorezm along the Turkmenistan border, is notable for the mutation of word‑initial [k] to [g].

By country

Turkmenistan

In Turkmenistan, since the 2000s, the government has conducted a forced 'Turkmenisation' of ethnic Uzbeks living in the country. During the Soviet era and in the 1990s, the Uzbek language was used freely in Turkmenistan. There were several hundred Uzbek‑language schools, and many newspapers were published in the language. Currently, however, there are only a few Uzbek schools in the country, as well as a small number of Uzbek‑language newspapers. Despite this, Uzbek is still considered one of the recognised languages of national minorities in Turkmenistan. Approximately 300,000–600,000 Uzbeks live in Turkmenistan. Most Uzbek speakers reside in Dashoghuz Velayat, as well as in Lebap Velayat, and partly in Ashghabad.

Russia

Uzbek is one of the many recognised languages of national minorities in Russia. More than 400,000 Uzbeks are citizens of the Russian Federation and reside in the country. In addition, there are between 2 and 6 million Uzbeks from the Central Asian republics (mainly Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) who live in Russia as immigrants or migrants. Large Uzbek diasporas are found in major Russian cities such as Saint Petersburg, where signs in Uzbek are often visible, particularly at restaurants, eateries, barbershops, and shops selling fruit, vegetables, and textiles. There is also a small clinic with signage and labels in Uzbek.

Uzbeks in Russia tend to use the Cyrillic Uzbek alphabet, although in recent years Uzbek youth in Russia have also been actively using the Latin Uzbek alphabet. Small newspapers in Uzbek are published in large Russian cities. Some instructions for immigrants are also provided in Uzbek.

Uzbek is studied by Russian students in faculties of Turkology throughout Russia. The largest centres for Uzbek language learning in Russia are located at universities in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. There are also many Russians who have a personal interest in and love for the Uzbek language and culture, and who study the language for their own enrichment. Uzbek is one of the most studied languages among the many post‑Soviet languages in Russia.

Uzbek language researchers

Scientific interest in the history of the Uzbek language arose in the 19th century among European and Russian orientalists. Á. Vámbéry, V. Bartold, Sh. Lapin, and others wrote on the history of the Uzbek language. Considerable attention was devoted to the study of the language's history during the Soviet period. Prominent linguists who wrote on the subject include E. Polivanov, N. Baskakov, A. Kononov, U. Tursunov, A. Mukhtarov, and Sh. Rakhmatullaev.

Sample text

The following is a sample text in Uzbek Arabic script of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (with English version in the bottom), contrasted with a version of the text in Uzbek written in Latin script.