Кичкина Шаҳзода / Kichkina Shahzoda — in Uzbek.
Uzbek (Oʻzbek tili) belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic family, its closest living relative being Uyghur across the border in China’s Xinjiang, and it stands quite apart from the Kipchak branch of neighbouring Kazakh and Kyrgyz and the Oghuz branch of neighbouring Turkmen. It is spoken across Uzbekistan and above all in the legendary oasis cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, those celebrated waypoints of the Silk Road where caravans once carried silk, spices and ideas between China, Persia and the Mediterranean world.
Modern Uzbek descends directly from Chagatai, the great classical literary Turkic language that flowered under the Timurid dynasty founded by Timur in the fourteenth century and reached its finest expression in the poetry of Ali Shir Navai in fifteenth century Herat, whose eloquent defence of Turkic verse alongside Persian gave the language a literary dignity it had never before enjoyed. Samarkand and Bukhara meanwhile grew into celebrated centres of Islamic learning and science in their own right, nowhere more vividly than in the magnificent observatory built at Samarkand by Ulugh Beg, Timur’s own grandson, whose astronomical tables remained among the most accurate in the world for generations afterwards.
What sets Uzbek apart most strikingly among its Turkic relatives, however, is a single remarkable grammatical peculiarity, its near total loss of vowel harmony, the system of matching vowel sounds within a word that governs virtually every other Turkic language from Istanbul to the Siberian taiga. This unusual drift away from the Turkic norm is generally traced to centuries of intimate bilingual coexistence between Turkic and Persian or Tajik speaking communities throughout Transoxiana, leaving Uzbek grammar thoroughly Turkic in its bones yet its vowels behaving in a distinctly Persian influenced, un-Turkic fashion. The language’s written form has proved equally restless, passing from Arabic script through a brief Latin experiment and then Cyrillic under Soviet rule, before returning, since independence in 1991, to Latin once again, a transition now considerably further advanced than the similar shift still under way among its Kazakh neighbours.
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