Southern Uzbek language

Southern Uzbek, also known as Afghan Uzbek, is the southern variant of the Uzbek language and an official language of Afghanistan where it is based and has up to 4.2 million speakers. It uses the Perso-Arabic writing system in contrast to the language variant of Uzbekistan.

Southern Uzbek
اوزبیکچه, اوزبیکی, اوزبیک تورکچه
Native toAfghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Tajikistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan
EthnicityUzbeks
Native speakers
4.2 million (2017)[1]
Early forms
Arabic
Official status
Official language in
 Afghanistan (3rd official language)
Recognised minority
language in
Regulated byAfghan Ministry of Education
Language codes
ISO 639-3uzs
Glottologsout2699[3]
Linguasphere44-AAB-da, db

Southern Uzbek is intelligible with the Northern Uzbek spoken in Uzbekistan to a certain degree. However it has differences in grammar and also many more loan words from Afghan Persian (in which many Southern Uzbek speakers are proficient). [4]

Southern Uzbek Alphabet
A 1911 text in Southern Uzbek
Main article: 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, it pronounces many of them in a different way.

See also

References
  1. Southern Uzbek at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Scott Newton (20 November 2014). Law and the Making of the Soviet World: The Red Demiurge. Routledge. pp. 232–. ISBN 978-1-317-92978-9.
  3. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Southern Uzbek". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  4. "Uzbek, Southern".
Online Dictionary

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