Uyghur

Where it’s spoken

Uyghur is the language of the Uyghur people, native to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China. About 11 million speakers live there, plus several hundred thousand across neighboring Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and a growing diaspora in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Europe. The Chinese government’s policies in Xinjiang since the 2010s have raised severe concerns about the language’s future.

What it sounds like

Uyghur has vowel harmony — front/back and rounded/unrounded vowel categories restrict which vowels can appear together in a word. It has eight vowels and 24 consonants, including uvular q, ɢ, and χ inherited from Old Turkic. Stress generally falls on the last syllable.

How it’s written

Uyghur is officially written in a modified Perso-Arabic script (Uyghur Arabic Alphabet) with 32 letters. Diaspora Uyghurs use a Uyghur Latin Yëziqi adopted in 2008. Earlier Cyrillic and other scripts were used during the 20th century. Short vowels are written, unlike in Persian or Arabic.

History

Uyghur descends from the Karakhanid and Chagatai Turkic literary traditions. The classical Uyghur Khaganate (8th–9th centuries) used the Old Uyghur script. Modern Uyghur diverged from the broader Turkic continuum during the 11th–14th centuries.