ABSTRACT
Uzbek, both in terms of cultural importance and number of speakers, is the second Turkic language after Turkish. As the latter is the successor of Ottoman Turkish, Uzbek as a literary idiom is the continuation of Chaghatay in what was once the focal area of use for that written language. Contact with other languages has been, and still is, important for several features of Uzbek. Among the other languages of Uzbekistan, Tajik is mainly spoken in the oases of Bukhara and Samarkand, and in the Ferghana Valley, while Russian is mainly spoken in the capital, Tashkent. The language situation is extraordinarily intricate due to the complex ethnic makeup of the Uzbek nation. The Kipchak Uzbeks were the latest group to arrive in Central Asia but have been dominant politically ever since. The realizations of suffixes are highly regular. The standard spelling is basically morphological and thus normally indicate vowel harmony or consonant assimilations.
