UZBEKS

A Central Asian people.

In the 1920s and 1930s, before the Soviet Union implemented language and nationalities policies, the Uzbek language, an eastern Turkic language of the Altaic family generally known as Turki (Chaghatai), was written in Arabic script and was the principal literary language for all Turkic-speaking central Asians. When they were forced to adopt Cyrillic script (i.e., the Russian and Slavic alphabet), Uzbeks and other central Asian Turks were denied easy access to their rich literary heritage, which dates to the fifteenth century.

Uzbeks practice Islam; they are Sunni Hanafi Muslims. Originally pastoral nomads, by the early part of the twentieth century they were predominantly sedentary subsistence farmers, herders, or inhabitants of small towns engaged in producing and marketing crafts. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Uzbeks were politically the preeminent force in the region. From the 1860s to 1991, the Uzbeks and other central Asian Muslims suffered colonial occupation of their lands by czarist Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union. As of 2001, Uzbeks constitute more than 80 percent of the population of the independent state of Uzbekistan; about 15 million Uzbeks speak the Northern Uzbek language. Uzbeks are also one of the larger ethnic minority groups in neighboring Tajikistan and in the northern part of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, where Southern Uzbek, a related but distinct language, is spoken.

Bibliography

Allworth, Edward A. The Modern Uzbeks: From the Fourteenth Century to the Present: A Cultural History. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1990.

m. nazif shahrani