UIGHUR LANGUAGE

also called New-uighur, member of the Turkic subfamily of the Altaic language family, spoken by Uighurs in the Uighur Autonomous Region of Sinkiang of northwestern China and in portions of Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, and Kyrgyzstan. The modern Uighur language, which was based on the Taranchi dialect spoken in Russia prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917, is classified with Uzbek in the southeastern (Uighur-Chagatai) branch of the Turkic languages. The Turkic language known as Yellow Uighur was closely related to Uighur but subsequently developed in isolation from it. The Uighur literary language was originally written in Arabic script; but a modified Latin alphabet was officially adopted in 1930, and in 1947, a modified Cyrillic alphabet was adopted within the Soviet Union. In China the Arabic script continues to be widely used for writing Uighur. See also Turkic languages.