Uzbek

About the Course

Uzbek, formerly known as Turkish or Western Turkish, is a Turkic language spoken using Uzbek. it is by far the professional and national language of Uzbekistan.

Uzbek language, a member of the Turkic language family within the Altaic language group, spoken in Uzbekistan, eastern Turkmenistan, northern and western Tajikistan, southern Kazakhstan, northern Afghanistan, and northwestern China. Uzbek belongs to the southeastern or Chagatai branch of the Turkic languages.

Roughly two main dialect groups can be distinguished in Uzbekistan. One includes southern or Iranian dialects (Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand) and semi-Iranian dialects (Fergana, Kokand), which modified the typical Turkic feature of vowel harmony under the influence of the Tajik language.

The second group includes North Uzbek dialects in southern Kazakhstan and several dialects in the Khiva region. These dialects show much less Iranian influence. (Kipchak-Uzbek is practically a dialect of Kazakh.) In the creation of a new literary language after the Russian Revolution in 1917, first the northern and later the southern dialects played a dominant role.

These serve as the basis of the current written language. Uzbek was written in Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic. In 1993, the government of Uzbekistan officially restored the modified Latin alphabet for the Uzbek language.