ABSTRACT

Introduction The tenn Chaghatay is fraught with inconsistencies. Orientalists have often applied it to any fonn of written Turkic used in an Islamic context in Eurasia outside the Ottoman Empire from the thirteenth century up to World War I. In contrast, as a linguistic tenn used by some authors from the seventeenth century onwards, Cha,ghatay has a more restricted meaning both historically and geographically, referring to the high literary language of the classical period of the fifteenth and sixteenth century.