ozbekcha

Ozbekcha, also transliterated as Ozbekcha or O‘zbekcha in Uzbek orthography, refers to the Uzbek language. It is a Turkic language spoken by the Uzbek people and serves as the official language of Uzbekistan. It belongs to the Karluk sub-branch of the Turkic language family and is closely related to Uyghur.

The language is spoken natively by the majority of Uzbekistan’s population and by Uzbek communities in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia, as well as in diaspora communities elsewhere. Uzbek has two primary dialect groups: Northern Uzbek, which forms the basis of the standard language in Uzbekistan, and Southern Uzbek, spoken in the south and in Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

Uzbek has undergone changes in its writing system. It used Cyrillic script during the Soviet era; since the 1990s Uzbekistan has promoted a Latin-based alphabet, though Cyrillic materials remain in use. Historically the Arabic script was used before the 20th century. The standard Uzbek orthography is based on the Tashkent variety, and the language features vowel harmony and extensive agglutinative morphology. It typically follows a subject–object–verb word order and employs multiple suffixes to convey grammatical relations and grammatical tense.

In Uzbekistan, Uzbek is the state language and the primary language of education and public life, with Russian widely used as a second language. In other countries, Uzbek is spoken within communities and media, and there are Uzbek-language schools and outlets in diaspora contexts.