Uzbek

Introduction

Uzbek is a member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. It is descended from Chagatai Turkic, an extinct Turkic language which once served as a lingua franca in Central Uzbekistan Map Asia. The word Chagatai relates to the Chagatai Khanate, the western part of the Mongol empire, left to Genghis Khan's second son Chagatai Khan.

Bukhara Chagatai Turkic was written with the Arabic alphabet and was influenced by Arabic and Persian. In the 14th century, the Chagatai Khanate was conquered by Timur, a native of Samarkand. Timur's successors were later ousted from the Chagatai Khanate by the Uzbeks. The Kazakhs, originated as dissident Uzbeks during the same period. Both groups became part of the Soviet Union in 1917. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan became independent countries.

Northern Uzbek
Uzbek Man In 1989, Northern Uzbek became the official language of the Republic of Uzbekistan where it is spoken as a first language by 16.5 million people. Today, it is used in the media, education, Bukhara entertainment, in business, and in government. More than half of the newspapers in Uzbekistan are published in Uzbek. Education in Uzbek is available from elementary to post-secondary level. It is also spoken in the other Central Asian countries, in addition to small expatriate communities in North America, Australia, and Europe (Ethnologue).

Southern Uzbek
Southern Uzbek is a related language spoken by about 1.5 million people in Afghanistan. It has a low literacy rate. It is also spoken in Pakistan and Turkey (Ethnologue).

Dialects

Uzbek Man

Uzbek Woman

Northern and Southern Uzbek are related but distinct languages whose speakers can understand each other only with difficulty due to differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

Northern Uzbek dialects are Karluk (Qarluq),Chigile, Kipchak (Kypchak), Lokhay, Sart. Some linguists think that Oghuz is a dialect of Khorasani Turkish rather than a dialect of Uzbek.

Uzbek dialects are usually divided into two groups:

the "O" group, which includes the dialects of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara and the surrounding regions, e.g., odam 'man'
the "A" group, e.g., adam 'man'.

Standard Uzbek is based on the Tashkent-Fergana "0" dialect group.

Structure

Sound System

UzbekWoman

Uzbek Man

Uzbek Woman

Northern Uzbek has 10 vowels, and 25 consonants. Unlike other Turkic languages, vowel harmony typical of other Turkic languages, has been mostly lost due to the influence of neighboring languages, especially Tajik.

Vowels

Northern Uzbek has 10 vowels: /i/, /e/, /a/, /u/, /o/ which can be either short or long. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning. Long vowels do not occur at the beginning of words.
Unlike all other Turkic languages, Uzbek does not have vowel harmony, a type of phonological process that involves constraints on which vowels may be found near each other, i.e., words can contain only all front or all back vowels, and all suffixes must conform to the vowel of the syllable preceding them in the word.

Consonants
Northern Uzbek has 25 consonant phonemes, i.e., sounds that distinguish word meaning.

x	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Alveo - Dental	Post-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	p - b	.x	t - d	.x	.x	k - g	q	?
Fricatives	.	f - v	s - z	-	.	.	x -	h
Affricates	x.	.x	.x	t	.x	.x	.	.
Nasals	m	.x	n	x.	.		.	.
Flap	.x	.x	r	.x	.x	.x	.	.
Lateral approximant	.x	.x	l	.	.x	.x	.	.
Palatal approximant	.	.	.	.	j	.	.	.
Semi-vowel	z.	z.	z.	z.	y	z.	.	.

q	no equivalent in English
?	like the glottal catch between the vowels in uh-oh
x -	no equivalents in English
	sh as in shop
	s as in measure
t	ch as in chap
	ng as in song
j	no equivalent in English

Click here to listen to the pronunciation of some common words in Uzbek.

Grammar

Uzbek Child

Samark

Like all Turkic languages, Uzbek is agglutinative, i.e., grammatical relations are indicated by the addition of suffixes to stems. There are no prefixes. There is a one-to-one relationship between suffixes and their meanings, so that suffixes are strung together one after another, sometimes resulting in long words. There are various rules for the ordering of suffixes. Kyrgyz uses postpositions rather than prepositions to signal grammatical relationships.

Noun phrase

Uzbek nouns are marked for number (singular and plural).
There is no grammatical gender.
There are five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative. Cases are marked by inflectional suffixes and governed by verbs and postpositions.
There are no articles.

Verb phrase
Verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. Verbs have the following grammatical categories:

two numbers: singular and plural;
three persons: 1st, 2, 3rd;
five moods: indicative, dubitative, imperative, conditional, subjunctive;
two voices: active and passive;
three tenses: present, past, future;
politeness (esteem);
evidentiality: Uzbek contrasts direct information (reported directly) and indirect information (reported indirectly).

Word order
The normal word order is Subject - Object - Verb, but other word orders are possible to mark topic and comment in discourse, e.g., Men kitob yozdim 'I book wrote'. As a SOV language where objects precede the verb, Uzbek has postpositions rather than prepositions, and relative clauses that precede the verb, e.g., Biz non haqida gapirdik 'We bread about talked'. Adjectives precede nouns they modify.

Vocabulary

Uzbek

Uzbek Children

The Northern Uzbek lexicon is basically Turkic with borrowings from Arabic, Persian, and Russian. Southern Uzbek has borrowed from Arabic, Persian, Dari, Pashto, and Tajik. Uzbek is influenced by Arabic (through Islam) and by Russian from the time when Uzbekistan was under czarist and Soviet domination, e.g., magazin from Russian magazin 'store'; televizor from Russian televizor 'TV set', telefon trubkasi 'telephone receiver' rom Russian telefonnaya trubka. Most of the Arabic loanwords came through Persian.

Below are some common words and phrases in Uzbek.

Uzbek Phrases

Below are Uzbek numerals 1-10.

Writing

Uzbekistan Mosque

Uzbek Postal Stamp

Uzbekistan Postal Stamp

An early form of Uzbek, known as Chagatai (named after one of the sons of Genghis Khan) and written with the Arabic script, emerged as a literary language in the 14th century.

A Latin-based alphabet for Northern Uzbek was adopted in 1927. In 1940, the Roman alphabet was forcibly replaced by a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet that is still in use today. Letters that were added to the Cyrillic alphabet to represent Uzbek sounds are normally listed at the end of the alphabet. Letters that are used only in borrowed words are given in parentheses.

Uzbek alphabet based on the Cyrillic script

Uzbek Cyrillic Alphabet

In 1995, an official Latin-based alphabet was introduced, however, the use of Cyrillic continues to be widespread. The deadline for making the switch to Latin has been pushed back a number of times. The latest deadline was 2005, but was pushed back again. Some scholars are not convinced that the switch will be made at all. The official 1995 Uzbek alphabet is given below.

Uzbek alphabet based on the Latin script (1995 version)

Uzbek Latin Alphabet

Click here to learn more about the official 1995 Uzbek alphabet based on the Latin script.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Uzbek.

UDHR Uzbek

In the Xinjiang province of China, Uzbek speakers continue to write using a modified Perso-Arabic alphabet, like that used for Uyghur. The same is true of Southern Uzbek spoken in Afghanistan.

Resources

Click here to find out where Uzbek is taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Uzbek.

Online resources for the study of Uzbek language and culture
Introduction to the Uzbek Language
SEELRC Webliography of Uzbek
Omniglot guide to Uzbek writing system
Wikipedia article on Uzbek Language
Ethnologue report on Northern Uzbek
Speaking Uzbek
Uzbek Glossary
Learn Uzbek
Short Uzbek Phrasebook
Central Asian Language Modules
Languages on the Web: Uzbek
Uzbek Dictionaries
Zangari-Kema Uzbek-English Dictionary
15 stories in Uzbek with sound and video (University of Washington)