Uyghur language

The Uyghur, Uighur or more exactly Uyghur (autonomous: ئۇيغۇر تىلى, Уйғур тили, Uyghur tili, Uyƣur tili or ئۇيغۇرچە, [ʊjˈʁʊr tili], also Уйғурчә, Uyghurche, Uyƣurqə, [ʊjʁʊrˈtʃɛ]) is a language of the Turkic family and has more than 7,000,000 speakers in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (China), where it is recognized as a co-official language with Chinese. Another 300,000 speakers live in Kazakhstan, in addition to small communities in Mongolia and the other Central Asian countries. The Uyghurs are one of the major ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China.

Historical, social and cultural aspects

Dialects

According to the usual classification in the People's Republic of China, Uyghur consists of three main dialects: Central Uyghur, with 4,700,000 speakers; the hotan, with 1,150,000; and Lop, with barely 25,000 speakers, according to data from www.ethnologue.com (see external links).

Linguistic description

Uyghur is an agglutinative language, suffixes are added to a common root; its structure is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb)

Similarity with Uzbek

Uyghur is very similar to Uzbek. In fact, the intelligibility between the two is practically total, which is why some linguists consider Uyghur and Uzbek two dialects of a single Uyghur-Uzbek language. The main difference between the two lies in the alphabet (the Uyghurs use Arabic and the Uzbeks use Cyrillic or Latin) and that the Uzbeks use many words of Russian origin. Both languages are derived from the Chagatai language.

Phonology

Vowels

Uyghur vowels are short by default, while long ones would resist vowel reduction and devoicing, introduce nonfinal stress, and parse as |Vj| or |Vr| before some suffixes.

The official Uyghur orthography does not mark vowel length and does not distinguish between /ɪ/ (i.e., بىلىم /bɪlɪm/ 'knowledge') and the later /ɯ/ (e.g., تىلىم /tɯlɯm / 'my language'); these two sounds are in complementary distribution, but phonological analyzes indicate that they have a role in vowel harmony and are separate phonemes.

/e/ only occurs in words of non-Turkish origin and as a result of raising the voice.

Vocal harmony

Uyghur, like other Turkic languages, shows vowel harmony. Words usually have the same type of vowel in several syllables except for compounds, loanwords, and a few other exceptions. Suffixes appear with the most posterior value of the root. The vowels /e, ɪ/ are transparent since they do not contrast in vowel posteriority. Uyghur also has rounding harmony.

Writing

Since the X century, when the Uyghurs converted to Islam, the language has been written in the variant alphabet Arabic used by Persian, with some added diacritics to represent Uyghur proper vowels. In the 1970s, the government of the People's Republic of China promoted a script reform with the adoption of the Latin alphabet. However, in 1987 the traditional Arabic alphabet was reinstated and the Latin script was officially abandoned, although it is now frequently used in communication via the Internet or SMS.