A language is the most portable thing a people owns. It can be carried across a border in the mouth, taught to a child in a kitchen, whispered when it cannot be spoken aloud. For the Uyghurs, the language is not merely a tool for communication but a record of everywhere they have been: a thousand years of trade, conversion, conquest, and exile, all sedimented into vocabulary and grammar. To learn where Uyghur comes from is to trace the Silk Road itself.

A Turkic Tongue

Uyghur belongs to the Turkic family, a group of languages spoken in a broad band from the Balkans to Siberia and including Turkish, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and dozens of others. Within that family it sits in the Karluk branch, sometimes called Southeastern Turkic, whose other principal member is Uzbek. The two are close enough that a Uyghur from Kashgar and an Uzbek from Samarkand can follow one another with patience and goodwill, the way a Portuguese speaker and a Spanish speaker can. Estimates of the number of Uyghur speakers vary, but most fall between ten and twelve million in the homeland, with perhaps another million or more across Central Asia and the wider diaspora.

What strikes a European learner first is how Uyghur builds its words. It is an agglutinative language, which means it stacks meaning onto a root by adding suffix after suffix, each one a small, regular piece. Where English needs a whole phrase, Uyghur can often manage a single long word, assembled like beads on a string: a root, then a plural, then a possessive, then a case ending, then a marker of tense or mood. A second feature governs the sound of it. Uyghur has vowel harmony, an old Turkic principle whereby the vowels within a word agree with one another, so that suffixes shift their shape to match the root they attach to. The effect is a language that flows in even, balanced runs of sound, and that hangs together with a logic closer to mathematics than to the irregular exceptions European speakers are used to.

The vocabulary tells its own history. Beneath the Turkic core lie centuries of borrowing that map the region’s encounters exactly. From Persian, the language of high culture across Central Asia for a thousand years, Uyghur took words for gardens, learning, and the finer things of settled life. From Arabic, carried by Islam, it took the vocabulary of faith, law, and the calendar. From Russian, in the twentieth century, came the words of machines and bureaucracy; from Mandarin, more recently and often under pressure, the terms of the modern Chinese state. A single Uyghur sentence can hold a Turkic verb, a Persian noun, and an Arabic abstraction, and carry all three without strain. The language is a palimpsest, and its speakers are fluent in a history most of them never have to think about.

The Script That Travelled

If the spoken language records where the Uyghurs have been, the written one records how far their influence reached. The Uyghurs were, for a long stretch of the medieval period, among the most literate peoples of Inner Asia, and the alphabet they used had an afterlife far larger than their own state. The Old Uyghur script descended, by way of the Sogdian merchants who ran the Silk Road, from the same Aramaic alphabet that stands behind Hebrew and Arabic. The Uyghurs adapted it to write their own Turkic speech, and wrote in it for centuries: Buddhist sutras, Manichaean hymns, contracts, and letters.

Then it spread. When Genghis Khan needed a script for the Mongol language, it was a captured Uyghur scribe who supplied one, adapting the Uyghur alphabet to Mongol around the start of the thirteenth century. That Mongol script, rotated to run in vertical columns, became in turn the parent of the Manchu script used by the dynasty that ruled all of China into the twentieth century. So the letters the Uyghurs had shaped in their oasis towns went on to write the correspondence of two empires. Few small peoples have left so large a mark on how a continent kept its records.

The Uyghurs themselves did not keep that alphabet. As Islam settled in, they adopted a modified Arabic script, which remains the one used in the homeland today. The twentieth century then brought a bewildering sequence of changes imposed from above. Uyghurs in the Soviet Union were shifted to a Latin alphabet in the 1920s and then to Cyrillic in the late 1930s; in China, a Latin-based script called the New Script was introduced in 1965 and then abandoned in 1982, when the Arabic script was restored. The result is a people who may write their single language in three different alphabets depending on which side of a border they were born on: Arabic script in Xinjiang, Cyrillic among the older communities of Central Asia, and a Latin transcription favoured in the West. It is an everyday inconvenience and, at the same time, a small map of a scattered nation.

A Literature to Match

A language with this depth did not wait for the modern age to produce literature. Two works from the eleventh century, both bound up with the Uyghur homeland, stand near the foundation of all Turkic writing. The first is the Kutadgu Bilig, or “Wisdom of Royal Glory,” a long poem of counsel composed in Kashgar around 1070 by Yusuf Khass Hajib, the earliest major literary work in a Karluk Turkic tongue. The second is the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, the great dictionary of the Turkic languages compiled in the same decade by Mahmud al-Kashgari, a scholar from the region who set out to explain his people’s speech to the Arabic-reading world. His book included the first known map of the lands where Turkic peoples lived, drawn with his home country near the centre. To read either work is to see a language already confident of its own worth nearly a thousand years ago.

That confidence never left. Poetry in particular holds a place in Uyghur life that is hard to overstate: verses are recited at weddings and funerals, quoted in argument, set to music and sung. Modern poets such as Abdurehim Otkur became national figures whose lines were memorised and passed along even when their books were hard to find, precisely because a poem needs no printing press to survive. In a culture where the written word has repeatedly been controlled, the spoken and sung word has carried the literature forward. The language remembers what libraries are not always allowed to keep.

The Language Now

All of which makes the present moment the sharper. A language this old and this widely spoken would seem secure, yet Uyghur is under a pressure that its long history has rarely seen. Since the late 1990s the authorities in the region have steadily replaced Uyghur with Mandarin as the language of instruction in schools, under the banner of “bilingual education” that in practice has meant less and less of the mother tongue. In 2023, United Nations human rights experts expressed grave concern that boarding schools in Xinjiang were teaching “almost exclusively in the official language with little or no use of Uyghur as medium of instruction,” and that teachers could be sanctioned for using Uyghur outside of designated language classes. A tongue that once taught Mongol emperors to write is now, in its own homeland, being edged out of the classroom.

What that policy cannot easily reach is the diaspora. In Istanbul and Almaty, in Munich and Amsterdam and Washington, Uyghur parents run weekend schools so that children born abroad will grow up able to speak to their grandparents. Poems are published that could not be printed at home, dictionaries are compiled, recordings are made. A language does not die because a state stops teaching it in one place, so long as it is still spoken somewhere with love. For now it is, in kitchens and community halls on several continents, by people who understand that to keep the language is to keep the nation.

Everything else in this archive, the history and the documentation and the culture under pressure, runs through this one channel. The Uyghurs are, before they are anything else, the people who speak Uyghur. As long as that is true, the rest can be remembered.