Uyghur

Uyghur, formerly known as Turki or Eastern Turki, is a Turkic language of the Karluk branch, with 8 to 13 million native speakers (as of 2021). It is spoken primarily by the Uyghur people, most of whom live in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Apart from Xinjiang, significant communities of Uyghur speakers are also located in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, and various other countries. Uyghur is a lingua franca of Xinjiang; it is widely used in both social and official spheres, as well as in print, television, and radio. Other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang also use Uyghur as a common language.

Uyghur belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family, which includes languages such as Uzbek. Like many other Turkic languages, Uyghur displays agglutination, lacks noun classes or grammatical gender, and is a left-branching language with subject–object–verb word order. With regard to vowel harmony, it has been described as being "in atrophy" with regard to Uyghur, very much akin to the situation with Uzbek. More distinctly, Uyghur processes include vowel reduction and umlauting, especially in northern dialects. In addition to other Turkic languages, Uyghur has historically been strongly influenced by Arabic and Persian, and more recently by Russian and Chinese.