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Uzbekistan
Language and Literature
As with ethnic patterns and boundaries of post-Soviet Uzbekistan,
the dominant native language, Uzbek, is in many ways a creation
of the Soviet state. Indeed, until the beginning of the Soviet
period, the languages spoken among the native population presented
a colorful and diverse mosaic. Under Soviet rule, officially at
least, this mosaic was replaced by Uzbek, which almost overnight
became the official language of the Turkic population of the republic.
But Russian, which at the same time was declared the "international
language" of Uzbekistan, was favored above even Uzbek in official
usage. Many Russian words made their way into Uzbek because Russian
was the language of higher education, government, and economic
activity throughout the Soviet era. In the 1980s, Uzbeks began
a strong effort to eliminate the recent Russian borrowings from
the language. The Latin alphabet was introduced to begin a gradual
process of replacing the Cyrillic alphabet. But in the mid-1990s
Russian still was widely used in official and economic circles.
Data as of March 1996
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