Turkic speakers probably settled the
Amu Darya,
Syr Darya and
Zarafshon river basins from at least 600–650 AD, gradually ousting or assimilating the speakers of the
Eastern Iranian languages who previously inhabited
Sogdia,
Bactria and
Khwarazm. The first Turkic dynasty in the region was that of the
Kara-Khanid Khanate from the 9th–12th centuries, a confederation of
Karluks,
Chigils,
Yagma, and other tribes. Uzbek (along with Uyghur) can be considered the direct descendant of Chagatai, the language of great Turkic Central Asian literary development in the realm of
Chagatai Khan,
Timur (Tamerlane), and the
Timurid dynasty (including the early Mughal rulers of the
Mughal Empire). Chagatai contained large numbers of Persian and Arabic
loanwords. By the 19th century, it was rarely used for literary composition and disappeared only in the early 20th century.
Muhammad Shaybani ( – 2 December 1510), the first
Khan of Bukhara, wrote poetry under the pseudonym "Shibani". A collection of Chagatai poems by Muhammad Shaybani is currently kept in the
Topkapı Palace Museum manuscript collection in
Istanbul. The manuscript of his philosophical and religious work,
Bahr al-Khudā, written in 1508, is located in London. Shaybani's nephew
Ubaydullah Khan (1486–1540) skillfully recited the
Quran and provided it with commentaries in Chagatai. Ubaydulla himself wrote poetry in Chagatai, Classical Persian, and Arabic under the literary pseudonym Ubaydiy. For the Uzbek political elite of the 16th century, Chagatai was their native language. For example, the leader of the semi-nomadic Uzbeks, Sheibani Khan (1451–1510), wrote poems in Chagatai. The poet Turdiy (17th century) in his poems called for the unification of the divided Uzbek tribes: "Although our people are divided, but these are all Uzbeks of ninety-two tribes. We have different names – we all have the same blood. We are one people, and we should have one law. Floors, sleeves and collars – it's all – one robe, So the Uzbek people are united, may they be in peace." Sufi Allayar (1633–1721) was an outstanding theologian and one of the
Sufi leaders of the Khanate of Bukhara. He showed his level of knowledge by writing a book called ''Sebâtü'l-Âcizîn''. Sufi Allayar was often read and highly appreciated in Central Asia. The term
Uzbek as applied to language has meant different things at different times. •
Uzbek was a
vowel-harmonised Kipchak language spoken by descendants of those who arrived in
Transoxiana who lived mainly around
Bukhara and
Samarkand. • Chagatai was a Karluk language spoken by the older settled Turkic populations ("
Sarts") of the region in the
Fergana Valley and the
Qashqadaryo Region, and in some parts of what is now the
Samarqand Region; it contained a heavier admixture of Persian and Arabic and did not have
vowel harmony. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Chagatai remained the main literary language in most of Central Asia, but it faced a phase of decay. Eventually, Chagatai was mostly referred to as the language of the
Sarts, the settled Turkic-speaking populations of the
Fergana Valley, although the definition of this term shifted through the decades. According to the Kazakh scholar
Serali Lapin, who lived at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century, "there is no special Sart language different from Uzbek". Russian researchers of the second half of the 19th century, like L. N. Sobolev, believed that "Sart is not a special tribe, as many tried to prove. Sart is indifferently called both Uzbek and Tajik, who live in the city and are engaged in trade". As part of the preparation for the 1924 establishment of the
Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, Chagatai was officially renamed "Old Uzbek", which
Edward A. Allworth argued "badly distorted the literary history of the region" and was used to give authors such as
Ali-Shir Nava'i an
Uzbek identity. After the independence of Uzbekistan, the Uzbek government opted to reform Northern Uzbek by changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin in an attempt to stimulate the growth of Uzbek in a new, independent state. However, the reform never went into full application, and both alphabets are widely used, from daily uses to government publications and TV news. The Uzbek language has not eclipsed Russian in the government sector since Russian is used widely in sciences, politics, and by the upper class of the country. However, the Uzbek internet, including
Uzbek Wikipedia, is growing rapidly. == Writing systems ==