It's directives like these that have led to the decline and disappearance of languages all over the world, including many indigenous languages. Uyghur is currently spoken by 10 to 25 million people in this portion of China as well as in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It has also been called Eastern Turkic. Formerly, it was an official language of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, used widely by the Uyghur people.
About Uyghur
Uyghur is a Turkic language, which means it's related to Turkish and other languages spoken in an area that stretches from Eastern Europe to northern Siberia. It belongs to the Karluk branch of this family, which also includes Uzbek, Salar, and Aini.
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| Distribution of Turkic Languages from Wikimedia.org |
Historical influences on the language include Persian and Arabic, while in more recent times it's been influenced by Chinese and Russian, picking up numerous loan words from these languages. It has three main dialects, the most common of which is the Central dialect spoken by ninety percent of Uyghur speakers. It's written primarily in an Arabic-Persian script, although some speakers use Roman or Cyrillic alphabets. Unlike most languages using Arabic script, written Uyghur requires the writer to indicate all the vowels.
Linguistic Gobbledygook
Linguistically, Uyghur exhibits the following qualities, which it shares with many other Turkic languages:
- Vowel harmony. Only certain combinations of vowels are allowed.
- Agglutination. Morphemes (the smallest meaningful "chunk" of a language, but not always equivalent to a word) are strung together without being modified to create a longer word. These long words can be the equivalent of a full sentence.
- No grammatical gender. Words are not classified as masculine or feminine, as in many romance and Slavic languages, for example.
Learn More:
Learn the language with A Handbook of Modern Uyghur. (pdf link)
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