Uyghur
ئۇيغۇرچە‎ / ئۇيغۇر تىلى‎
Pronunciation	[ʔʊjˈʁʊrtʃɛ]
Spoken in	China, Kazakhstan; also spoken in Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and Uzbekistan[1]
Region	Xinjiang
Native speakers	8–11 million[1][2]  (2000–2005)
Language family	Turkic Uyghuric Uyghur
Writing system	Arabic-based script, in the past other Uyghur alphabets
Official status
Official language in	China (Xinjiang)
Regulated by	Working Committee of Ethnic Language and Writing of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ug
ISO 639-2	uig
ISO 639-3	uig
Geographical extent of Uyghur in China
This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

Uyghur language
Uyghur language
Uyghur dialects
Uyghur phonology
Uyghur grammar
Uyghur alphabet
Sogdian · Old Uyghur · Old Turkic
Arabic · Latin · Yengi Yeziⱪ · Cyrillic
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Uyghur (ئۇيغۇرچە‎, Uyghurche),^[3][4] formerly known as Eastern Turkish, is a Turkic language with 8 to 11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Significant communities of Uyghur-speakers are located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and various other countries have Uyghur-speaking expatriate communities. Uyghur is an official language of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and is widely used in both social and official spheres, as well as in print, radio, and television, and is used as a lingua franca by other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang^{[citation needed]}.

Uyghur belongs to the Uyghuric branch of the Turkic language family, which also includes languages such as Salar and the more distantly related Uzbek. Like many other Turkic languages, Uyghur displays vowel harmony and agglutination, lacks noun classes or grammatical gender, and is a left-branching language with subject–object–verb word order. More distinctly Uyghur processes include, especially in northern dialects, vowel reduction and umlauting. In addition to influence of other Turkic languages, Uyghur has historically been influenced strongly by Persian and Arabic, and more recently by Mandarin Chinese and Russian.

Uyghur began being written in the fifth century. The Arabic-derived writing system is the most common and the only standard in China, although other writing systems are used for auxiliary and historical purposes. Unlike most Arabic-derived scripts, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet has mandatory marking of all vowels. Two Latin and one Cyrillic alphabet are also used, though to a much lesser extent. The Arabic and Latin alphabets have 32 characters, while the Cyrillic alphabet adds two characters ⟨Я⟩ and ⟨Ю⟩ to represent the sequences /ja/ and /ju/.

History[link]

The Old Turkic language is an ancient Turkic language used from the 7th to 13th centuries in Mongolia and the Xinjiang region, and is especially found among the Orkhon inscriptions and Turpan texts. It is the direct ancestor of the Uyghur Turkic languages, including Uyghur and the Uzbek language. By contrast, the Western Yugur language, although in geographic proximity, is more closely related to the Siberian Turkic languages in Siberia.^[5]

Probably around 1077,^[6] a scholar of the Turkic languages, Mahmud al-Kashgari from Kashgar in modern-day Xinjiang, published a Turkic language dictionary and description of the geographic distribution of many Turkic languages, Divān-ul Lughat-ul Turk (English: Compendium of the Turkic Dialects; Uyghur: تۈركى تىللار دىۋانى‎ Türki Tillar Divani). The book, described by scholars as an "extraordinary work,"^[7][8] documents the rich literary tradition of Turkic languages; it contains folk tales (including descriptions of the functions of shamans^[8]) and didactic poetry (propounding "moral standards and good behaviour"), besides poems and poetry cycles on topics such as hunting and love,^[9] and numerous other language materials.^[10]

Old Turkic, through the influence of Perso-Arabic after the 13th century, developed into the Chagatai language, a literary language used all across Central Asia until the early 20th century. After Chaghatai fell into extinction, the standard versions of Uyghur and Uzbek were developed from dialects in the Chagatai-speaking region, showing abundant Chaghatai influence. Uyghur language today shows considerable Persian influence as a result from Chagatai, including numerous Persian loanwords.^[11]

The historical term "Uyghur" was appropriated for the language formerly known as Eastern Turki by government officials in the Soviet Union in 1922 and in Xinjiang in 1934.^[12][13] Sergey Malov was behind the idea of renaming Turki to Uyghurs.^[14]

Classification[link]

The Uyghur language belongs to the Uyghur Turkic (or Uyghuric) branch of the Turkic language family. It is closely related to Western Yugur, Salar, Aini, Lop, Ili Turki, the extinct languages Old Turkic and Chagatay (the East Uyghuric languages), and more distantly to Uzbek (which is West Uyghuric).

Early linguistic scholarly studies of Uyghur include Julius Klaproth's 1812 Dissertation on language and script of the Uighurs (Abhandlung über die Sprache und Schrift der Uiguren) which was disputed by Isaak Jakob Schmidt. In this period, Klaproth correctly asserted that Uyghur was a Turkic language, while Schmidt believed that Uyghur should be classified with Tangut languages.^[15]

Dialects[link]

It is widely accepted that Uyghur has three main dialects, all based on their geographical distribution. Each of these main dialects have a number of sub-dialects which all are mutually intelligible to some extent.

• Central: Spoken in an area stretching from Kumul towards south to Yarkand
• Southern: Spoken in an area stretching from Guma towards east to Charqaliq
• Eastern: Spoken in an area stretching from Charqaliq towards north to Chongköl

The Central dialects are spoken by 90% of the Uyghur-speaking population, while the two other branches of dialects only are spoken by a relatively small minority.^[16]

Vowel reduction is common in the northern parts of where Uyghur is spoken, but not in the south.^[17]

Status[link]

Uyghur is spoken by about 8-11 million people in total.^[1][2][18] In addition to being spoken primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China, mainly by the Uyghur people, Uyghur is also spoken by some 300,000 people in Kazakhstan as of 1993, some 90,000 in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan as of 1998, 3,000 in Afghanistan and 1,000 in Mongolia, both as of 1982.^[2] Smaller communities also exist in Albania, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States.^[1]

The Uyghurs are one of the 56 recognized ethnic groups in China, and Uyghur is an official language of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, along with Standard Chinese. As a result, Uyghur can be heard in most social domains in Xinjiang, and also in schools, government and courts.^[2] Of the other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, those populous enough to have their own autonomous prefectures, such as the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz, have access to schools and government services in their native language. Smaller minorities, however, will not have a choice and must attend Uyghur language school.^[19] These include the Xibe, Tajiks of China, Daurs, and Russians.^[20]

About 80 newspapers and magazines are available in Uyghur; five TV channels and ten publishers serve as the Uyghur media. Outside of China, Radio Free Asia and TRT provide news in Uyghur.

Phonology[link]

Vowels[link]

The vowels of the Uyghur language are, in their alphabetical order (in Uyghur Latin Script ' Uyghur Latin Yëziqi '), ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨ë ⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨ü⟩. There are no diphthongs in Uyghur and when two vowels come together, which occurs in some loanwords, each vowel retains its individual sound. And disregarding vowel length distinction in current Uyghur orthographies.
The Uyghur vowel system is characterised by the oppositions front vs. back, high vs. low and unrounded vs. rounded.

Uyghur vowels are by default short, but some phonologists^[who?] have argued that long vowels also exist because of historical vowel assimilation (above) and through loanwords. Underlyingly long vowels would resist vowel reduction and devoicing, introduce non-final stress, and be analyzed as |Vj| or |Vr| before a few suffixes. However, the conditions in which they are actually pronounced as distinct from their short counterparts have not been fully researched.^[21]

Official Uyghur orthographies do not mark vowel length, and also do not distinguish between /ɪ/ (e.g., بىلىم‎ /bɪlɪm/ 'knowledge') and back /ɯ/ (e.g., تىلىم‎ /tɯlɯm/ 'my language'); these two sounds are in complementary distribution, but phonological analyses claim that they play a role in vowel harmony and are separate phonemes.^[22] /e/ only occurs in words of non-Turkic origin and as the result of vowel raising.^[23]

Uyghur has systematic vowel reduction (or vowel raising) as well as vowel harmony. Words usually agree in vowel backness, but compounds, loans, and some other exceptions often break vowel harmony. Suffixes surface with the rightmost [back] value in the stem, and /e, ɪ/ are transparent (as they don't contrast for backness). Uyghur also has rounding harmony.^[24]