Uzbek belongs to the Eastern Turkic or Karluk, branch of the Turkic language family. External influences include Arabic, Persian and Russian. One of the most noticeable distinctions of Uzbek from other Turkic languages is the rounding of the vowel /ɑ/ to /ɒ/, a feature that was influenced by Persian. Standard Uzbek is also notable for its complete loss of vowel harmony, a characteristic Turkic feature.
In the language itself, Uzbek is oʻzbek tili or oʻzbekcha. In Cyrillic, it is ўзбек тили or ўзбекча. In Arabic script, اوزبیک تیلی and اوزبیکچه.
Turkic speakers stared settling the Amu Darya, Syr Darya and Zarafshan river basins from 600–700 CE, gradually ousting or assimilating the speakers of Eastern Iranian languages who previously inhabited Sogdia, Bactria and Khwarezm.
The first Turkic dynasty in the region was that of the Kara-Khanid Khanate in the 9th–12th centuries, who were a confederation of Karluks, Chigils, Yaghma and other tribes. Their language became a literary language of the region after the Mongol conquests, when the Chagatai
Khanate was established and the region became Turkified in language and
culture. The region was conquered by the Uzbeks
under Muhammad Shaybani in 1500 who founded the Khanate of Bukhara.
The Uzbeks were tribes from the Kipchak, a northwesterly branch of Turkic
peoples. Like most Kipchaks they were nomads who herded livestock across the steppe and spoke Kipchak. The existing more numerous settled Turkic populations (sarts) however spoke a persianized Turkic dialect known as Karluk,
The term Uzbek as applied to language has as such meant different things at different times. Prior to 1921 "Uzbek" and "Sart" were considered to be different dialects:
- "Uzbek" was a vowel-harmonised Kipchak variety spoken by descendants of those who arrived in Transoxiana with Muhammad Shaybani in the 16th century, who lived mainly around Bukhara and Samarkand, although the Turkic spoken in Tashkent was also vowel-harmonised. It can be called old Uzbek and it's considered to be related to that specific group of people.
- "Sart" was from the Karluk branch spoken by the older settled Turkic populations 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. It became the standard Uzbek language and the official dialect of Uzbekistan.
- In the Khanate of Khiva, sarts spoke a highly Oghuz Turkified form of Karluk Turkic.
After 1921 the Soviet Union abolished the term Sart as derogatory, and decreed that henceforth the entire settled Turkic population of Turkestan would be known as Uzbeks. The standard written language that was chosen for the new republic in 1924 was the "Sart" language of the Samarkand region. All three dialects continue to exist within modern spoken Uzbek.
Uzbek has been written in a variety of scripts throughout history:
- Pre-1928: the Arabic-based Yaña imlâ alphabet
- 1880s: Russian started use Cyrillic for Uzbek.
- 1928–1940: the Latin-based Yañalif used officially.
- 1940–1992: the Cyrillic script used officially.
- Since 1992: a Yañalif-based Latin script is official in Uzbekistan.
Despite the official status of the Latin script in Uzbekistan, the use of Cyrillic is still widespread, especially in advertisements and signs. In newspapers, scripts may be mixed, with headlines in Latin and articles in Cyrillic.The Arabic script is no longer used in Uzbekistan except symbolically in limited texts or for the academic studies of Chagatai (Old Uzbek).
In the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where there is an Uzbek minority, Arabic is still used.
In Afghanistan, the traditional Arabic orthography is still used.
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