Southern Uzbek or Uzbeki (
Uzbek: اوزبیکچه, اوزبیکی, اوزبیک تورکچه) is the southern variant of the
Uzbek language
Uzbek (''Oʻzbekcha, Oʻzbek tili or Ўзбекча, Ўзбек тили''), formerly known as ''Turki'' or ''Western Turki'', is a Turkic language spoken by Uzbeks. It is the official, and national language of Uzbekistan. Uzbek is spoken as ...
spoken in
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordere ...
and
Pakistan
Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 243 million people, and has the world's second-lar ...
by the
Uzbek people. It has up to 6 million speakers and is written using the
Perso-Arabic
The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran ( Western Persian) and Afghanistan (Dari Persian) since the 7th cen ...
or
Nastaliq writing system in contrast to the language variant of
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan (, ; uz, Ozbekiston, italic=yes / , ; russian: Узбекистан), officially the Republic of Uzbekistan ( uz, Ozbekiston Respublikasi, italic=yes / ; russian: Республика Узбекистан), is a doubly landlocked co ...
.
Southern Uzbek is intelligible with the Northern Uzbek spoken in
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan (, ; uz, Ozbekiston, italic=yes / , ; russian: Узбекистан), officially the Republic of Uzbekistan ( uz, Ozbekiston Respublikasi, italic=yes / ; russian: Республика Узбекистан), is a doubly landlocked co ...
. However it has slightly more loan words from
Farsi
Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken an ...
, in which many Southern Uzbek speakers are proficient and few loanwords from
Pashto
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official langua ...
.
Southern Uzbek Alphabet
Southern Uzbek is written using the Perso-Arabic writing system called ''Arab Yozuv'' ("Arab Script"). Although it contains the same 32 letters which are used in
Persian
Persian may refer to:
* People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language
** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples
** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...
, it pronounces many of them in a different way.
See also
*
Chagatai language
Chagatai (چغتای, ''Čaġatāy''), also known as ''Turki'', Eastern Turkic, or Chagatai Turkic (''Čaġatāy türkīsi''), is an extinct Turkic literary language that was once widely spoken across Central Asia and remained the shared litera ...
*
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic l ...
References
External links
; Online Dictionary:
Word translator from Southern Uzbek to Farsi
{{Authority control
Agglutinative languages
Turkic languages
Turkic languages of Afghanistan
Languages of Pakistan
Turkic languages of Pakistan
Uzbek language
Articles citing Nationalencyklopedin