Uzbek language
Turkic language
Uzbek is a Karluk Turkic language spoken by Uzbeks. It is the official and national language of the Republic of Uzbekistan and formally succeeded Chagatai, an earlier Karluk language endonymically called Türki or Türkçe, as the literary language of Uzbekistan in the 1920s.
According to the Ethnologue, Southern Uzbek and Standard Uzbek are spoken as a native language by more than 36 million people around the world, making Uzbek the second-most widely spoken Turkic language after Turkish. In addition to these native speakers, there are members of many other ethnic groups such as Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Russians who live in Uzbekistan and speak Uzbek as their second language.
There are two major variants of the Uzbek language: Northern Uzbek, or simply "Uzbek", spoken in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and China; and Southern Uzbek, spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both Northern and Southern Uzbek are divided into many dialects. Uzbek and Uyghur are sister languages and they constitute the Karluk or "Southeastern" branch of Turkic.
External influences on Uzbek include Persian, Russian, and Arabic. One of the most noticeable distinctions of Uzbek from other Turkic languages is the rounding of the vowel /ɑ/ to /ɒ/ under the influence of Persian. Unlike other Turkic languages, vowel harmony is almost completely lost in modern Standard Uzbek due to extensive linguistic contact with Persian, though it is still observed to some small degree in its dialects, as well as in its sister Karluk language Uyghur.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Uzbek language” is turkic language. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Uzbek, language and Turkic, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9264. Authority coordinates are 41.000, 64.000. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Uzbek language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.