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Uzbek

Uzbek

Summary

Uzbek is natively spoken by about 34 million people, primarily in Uzbekistan, where it is the official language, and among Uzbek communities in neighboring Central Asian countries. It is integral to Uzbek cultural identity, known for its Silk Road history, traditional dance (like the Bukhara and Khorezm dances), and hospitality customs. Written in the Latin alphabet (since 1992, previously Cyrillic), Uzbek grammar features a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, vowel harmony, and agglutination, where suffixes are added to roots to modify meaning.

Stats

  • Language Family: Turkic

  • Writing System: Latin

  • Writing System Type: Alphabet

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: N

  • Morphology: Agglutinative

  • Cases: 6

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 0

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 3

  • Word Order: SOV

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 6

  • Number of Consonants: 23

Areas Where Spoken

  • Afghanistan (7.0%) (2.88 mil)

  • Kyrgyzstan (13.6%) (949 k)

  • Tajikistan (23.2%) (2.31 mil)

  • Uzbekistan (official) (80.0%) (28.5 mil)

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