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Uzbekistan
Linguistic Background
Uzbek is a Turkic language of the Qarluq family, closely related
to Uyghur and Kazak. Although numerous local dialects and variations
of the language are in use, the Tashkent dialect is the basis
of the official written language. The dialects spoken in the northern
and western parts of Uzbekistan have strong Turkmen elements because
historically many Turkmen lived in close proximity to the Uzbeks
in those regions. The dialects in the Fergana Valley near Kyrgyzstan
show some Kyrgyz influence. Especially in the written dialect,
Uzbek also has a strong Persian vocabulary element that stems
from the historical influence of Iranian culture throughout the
region (see Early History, this ch.).
Uzbek has a relatively short history as a language distinct from
other Turkic dialects. Until the establishment of the Soviet republic's
boundaries in the 1920s, Uzbek was not considered a language belonging
to a distinct nationality. It was simply a Turkic dialect spoken
by a certain segment of the Turkic population of Central Asia,
a segment that also included the ruling tribal dynasties of the
various states. The regional dialects spoken in Uzbekistan today
reflect the fact that the Turkic population of Southern Central
Asia has always been a mixture of various Turkic tribal groups
(see Ethnic Groups, ch. 1; Social Structure, ch. 2; Population,
ch. 5). When the present-day borders among the republics were
established in 1929, all native peoples living in Uzbekistan (including
Tajiks) were registered as Uzbeks regardless of their previous
ethnic identity.
Until 1924 the written Turkic language of the region had been
Chaghatai, a language that had a long and brilliant history as
a vehicle of literature and culture after its development in the
Timurid state of Herat in the late fifteenth century. Chaghatai
also was the common written language of the entire region of Central
Asia from the Persian border to Eastern Turkestan, which was located
in today's China. The language was written in the Arabic script
and had strong Persian elements in its grammar and vocabulary.
Experts identify the Herat writer Ali Shir Nava'i as having played
the foremost role in making Chaghatai a dominant literary language.
In modern Uzbekistan, Chaghatai is called Old Uzbek; its origin
in Herat, which was an enemy state of the Uzbeks, is ignored or
unknown. Use of the language was continued by the Uzbek khanates
that conquered the Timurid states. Some early Uzbek rulers, such
as Mukhammad Shaybani Khan, used Chaghatai to produce excellent
poetry and prose. The seventeenth-century Khivan ruler Abulgazi
Bahadur Khan wrote important historical works in Chaghatai. However,
all of those writers also produced considerable literature in
Persian. Chaghatai continued in use well into the twentieth century
as the literary language of Central Asia. Early twentieth-century
writers such as Fitrat wrote in Chaghatai.
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Chaghatai
was influenced by the efforts of reformers of the Jadidist movement,
who wanted to Turkify and unite all of the written languages used
in the Turkic world into one written language (see The Russian
Conquest, this ch.). These efforts were begun by the Crimean Tatar
Ismail Gaspirali (Gasprinskiy in Russian), who advocated this
cause in his newspaper Terjuman (Translator). Gaspirali
called on all the Turkic peoples (including the Ottoman Turks,
the Crimean and Kazan Tatars, and the Central Asians) to rid their
languages of Arabic, Persian, and other foreign elements and to
standardize their orthography and lexicon. Because of this effort,
by the early 1920s the Turkic languages of Central Asia had lost
some of the Persian influence.
Data as of March 1996
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