Uzbek language

The formation of the Uzbek language was complex and multifaceted.

Largely thanks to the efforts of Alisher Navoi , Old Uzbek became a unified and developed literary language, the norms and traditions of which were preserved until the end of the XIX century. At the beginning of the XX century. in the Uzbek literary language, a tendency has appeared to democratize its norms, as a result of which it has become simpler and more accessible.

Until the beginning of the 20th century. in the territory of the Bukhara Khanate and the Khorezm (Khiva) state, the literary languages ​​were Persian and Chagatai (Old Uzbek). Since the beginning of the 20th century, mainly the efforts of supporters of Jadidism ( Fitrat , Niyazi , etc.) have created a modern literary language based on the Ferghana dialect.

The term “Uzbek” as applied to the language had different meanings at different times. Until 1921, " Uzbek " and " Sart " were considered as two dialects of the same language. At the beginning of the 20th century, N. F. Sitnyakovsky wrote that the language of the Sarts of Ferghana is “purely” Uzbek (Uzbek-tili) ^[4] . According to the Kazakh Turkologist Sera Lapin , who lived in the late XIX - early XX centuries, “there is no special Sart people different from Uzbeks, and there is no special Sart language different from Uzbek” ^[5] . Others shared sarts and Uzbeks.

“ Sartsky ” was called the Karluk dialect of the more ancient inhabitants of Kashkadarya , Ferghana and partially Samarkand regions. The Sartian version was characterized by a strong Iranianism with a large admixture of Tajik and Arabic vocabulary and the absence of syngarmony . The Sarts living in Khiva (Khorezm) spoke a strongly irranized, but already Oguz dialect.

In Soviet times, the Uzbek script underwent several spelling reforms and in 1940 was translated into an alphabet created on the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet . In 1993, Uzbek was officially translated into the Latin alphabet . However, unlike Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan , Soviet-style Cyrillic continues to be used even at the official level, coexisting with the Latin alphabet. Moreover, the Uzbek Latin alphabet adopted in 1995 is actually a transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet, which differs from all other Turkic Latin scripts. Among the Uzbeks of Iran , Afghanistan , Pakistan and China , the Arabic alphabet prevails.

Since Uzbekistan gained independence, there have been tendencies towards the purification of the language, its purification from borrowings, mainly Russian words, to their active replacement with borrowings from either Old Uzbek, or Arabic and Persian ^[6] .

The modern Uzbek language has a complex dialect structure and occupies a peculiar place in the classification of Turkic languages . The dialects of modern spoken Uzbek are genetically heterogeneous (carriers of the Karluk , Kypchak , Oguz dialect groups participated in their formation), are conditionally divided into 2 groups according to the phonetic sign - “surrounding” (dialects of the cities of Tashkent , Samarkand , Bukhara , etc. and the surrounding areas) and “ acoustics ”(divided into two subgroups depending on the use of the initial consonant“ j ”or“ j ”);

There are four main dialect groups.

• North-Uzbek dialects of southern Kazakhstan ( Ikan-Karabulak , Karamurt , probably belong to the Oguz group).
• South Uzbek dialects of central and eastern part of Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan , as well as dialects of most large centers of settlement of Uzbeks (Tashkent, Ferghana, Karshi, Samarkand-Bukhara and Turkestan-Shymkent) belong to the Karluk (Chagatai), or southeastern group of Turkic languages ; on this basis, it is customary to attribute to it, along with the Uyghur , and the Uzbek language as a whole. Ferghana and Turkestan-Chimkent dialects are closest to the literary norm. The pronunciation standard is assigned to the Ferghana-Tashkent group of dialects (after 1937).

The main feature of these dialects is that they are more or less irranized. The lasting influence of Iranian dialects (mainly the Tajik language ) is strongly noticeable here not only at the lexical, but also at the phonetic levels.

• The Oguz group includes the Khorezm dialect close to the Turkmen language and other dialects of the south- and north-west of Uzbekistan (as well as two dialects in Kazakhstan) under the general name Oguz dialect . In the classification of A. N. Samoilovich, these dialects are described as the Khiva-Uzbek and Khiva-Sart dialects and are allocated to an independent group called the Kypchak-Turkmen dialect.
• Kipchak dialects , relatively close to the Kazakh language , are common throughout the country, as well as in other republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan . The Surkhandarya dialect can also be attributed to this. Historically, these dialects were formed among nomadic Uzbeks , who were originally related to the Kazakhs , but not former subjects of the Kazakh Khanate .

Uzbek, like other Turkic is an agglutinative language , with elements of analyticism (about 30 verbs are used to form analytical verb forms with different meanings, analytical names are formed in names using postpositions ).

Unlike most other Turkic languages, the Uzbek morphology is characterized by the univariance of affixes (as a result of the absence of syngarmonism ).

It does not have a grammatical category of gender: there is no agreement in gender, case and in the number of definition and determinable. It is mandatory to coordinate the subject and predicate in the person, but not necessarily in the number.

In Uzbek 6 cases:

• the main one is a zero indicator;
• genitive (definitive) - indicator -ning ; draws up the adopted definition;
• dative ( directive ) - indicator -ga ; expresses the orientation of the action on the object; mainly draws up an indirect addition;
• accusative - indicator -ni ; acts as a direct addition;
• local - indicator -da ; expresses the place or time of the action, the name acts as a circumstance;
• initial - indicator -dan ; basically, it expresses the object through which (through which, by which, through which) an action is performed.

The noun has a category of affiliation ( isafet ), the forms of which are formed using affixes of affiliation, indicating the face of the owner: kitob “book”, kitobim “my book”, kitobing “your book”, kitobi “his (her) book”; uka “brother”, ukam “my brother”, ukang “your brother”, ukasi his (her) brother; oʻzbek “ Uzbek”, til “language” - oʻzbek tili “Uzbek language”.

In many ways, under the influence of Tajik and Persian, the Uzbek language is noticeably different from other Turkic phonetically.

After the spelling reform in 1934, the number of vowels was reduced to 6 (4 letters ə , ɵ , y , b were used to write ä , ö , ü , ı ), and in 1937 the strongly irranized Tashkent dialect was finally adopted as the basis pronunciation norms of the literary language ^[7] .

The main phonological features: lack of vowel harmony ( syngarmonism ) and peril ^[8] .

The law of vowel harmony, characteristic of most Turkic languages, lies in the fact that a word can contain either only vowels of the front row or only vowels of the back row. In modern Uzbek, the common Turkic vowels o and ö correspond to the same sound “o”, in spelling - ў (Cyrillic) or oʻ (Latin); u and ü - like Russian. "Y"; ı and i - as Russian. "and". The remnants of vocal syngarmonism survived only in the Kypchak dialects. ^[8] “Okane” consists in the transition in some cases of the common Turkic a to [ ɔ ] or [ ɑ ] “o”, while the common Turkic ä more often [ æ ] is realized as a simple “a” ^[8] .

Other features: lack of primary long vowel sounds. Secondary (substitution) longitudes appear as a result of the loss of an adjacent consonant vowel ^[8] . Phonetic ultra-longitude or emphatic lengthening of individual vowels is observed. There is no division of affixes into front and rear.

The vocabulary of the modern literary Uzbek language is based on words of common Turkic origin, however, unlike the neighboring Kypchak languages , the Uzbek vocabulary is rich in Persian and Arabic borrowings. The influence of the Russian language is noticeable in the preserved significant layer of household, socio-political and technical vocabulary that came from the conquest of Turkestan by tsarist Russia (second half of the 19th century) to the present time, especially during the Soviet era (until 1991).

Until 1928, the Uzbek language used the Arabic alphabet . From 1928 to 1940 in the USSR , writing was used based on the Latin alphabet . From 1940 to 1992, Cyrillic was used in the USSR. In 1992, the Uzbek language in Uzbekistan was again translated into Latin (despite the reform of translating the Uzbek language into Latin script, in fact, the parallel use of Cyrillic and Latin scripts is ongoing), which differs significantly both from the 1928 alphabet and from modern Turkic Latin letters (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Turkmen, etc.). In particular, in the modern Uzbek alphabet used in Uzbekistan, for unification with the main Latin alphabet, there are no characters with diacritics , while the 1928 alphabet used not only characters with diacritics, but also unique characters invented specially by Soviet linguists for languages ​​of small peoples of the USSR. For example, the sounds [w] and [h] are now denoted in the same way as in English. In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the alphabet based on the Cyrillic alphabet is used for the Uzbek language, and in Afghanistan - based on the Arabic script.

The transcription of Uzbek personal names and geographical names, traditionally accepted in Russian, has two features. The first is the non-reflection on the letter of the Uzbek oceans of Western dialects, preserved from pre-revolutionary times. For example, Uzbek names and names, transmitted in the Russian tradition as Bekabad , Andijan , are written in Uzbek Bekobod , Andijon . In these words there is a sound more closed than [a], but more open than [o].

The second feature is the tradition that appeared under the influence of the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet to convey the sound [o] in many words, which was denoted in the Cyrillic alphabet by the letter через, through y due to the similarity of the corresponding letters: “Uzbekistan” - стон Uzbekistan ( Oʻzbekiston ). In fact, in these words there is a sound more closed than [o], but more open than [y].

The Uzbek language is spoken in Uzbekistan and other neighboring countries.

• Khorezm-Turkic language
• Chagatai language (Old Uzbek)
• Uzbek language in Kyrgyzstan

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• Ismatullaev Kh. H. Self-teacher of the Uzbek language. - Tashkent: Kituvchi, 1991 .-- 145 p.
• Kononov A.N. Grammar of the modern Uzbek literary language. - M., L .: Publishing house of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1960.
• Khodzhiev A.P. Uzbek Language // World Languages: Turkic Languages. - M .: Institute of Linguistics, RAS, 1996. - S. 426-437. - (Languages ​​of Eurasia). - ISBN 5-655-01214-6 .
• Boeschoten, Hendrik. Uzbek // The Turkic Languages ​​/ Edited by Lars Johanson and Éva Á. Csató. - Routledge, 1998 .-- S. 357-378.
• Johanson, Lars. Uzbek // Concise Encyclopedia of Languages ​​of the World / Keith Brown, Sarah Ogilvie. - Elsevier, 2009 .-- S. 1145-1148. - ISBN 978-0-08-087774-7 .

• Russian-Uzbek and Uzbek-Russian dictionaries and phrasebooks (Latin and Cyrillic)
• Russian-Uzbek dictionary