ABSTRACT
The term ‘Chaghatay’ is fraught with inconsistencies. Orientalists have often applied it to any form 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 term used by some authors from the seventeenth century onward, Chaghatay has a more restricted meaning both historically and geographically, referring to the high literary language of the classical period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After an unstable period following Chaghatay's death, Timur Lenk came to power in 1370 and took a firm hold of Transoxania. Chaghatay can be defined as a succession of stages of written Turkic in Central Asia. The impact of Persian was very strong and reinforced by widespread bilingualism not only among the elite. The analysis of the actual situation is complicated by the fact that so much of Chaghatay literature consists of translations from Persian.
