ABSTRACT
Uyghur is one of the two Central Asian languages in the southeastern branch of Turkic. It has about 10 million native speakers, predominantly in the People’s Republic of China, where the number of Uyghurs is 10,069,346. The Uyghurs in China mainly live in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where they constitute 43.3% of the population. The Uyghurs living in Taoyuan County of Hunan Province are remnants of the Uyghurs who migrated there in the fourteenth century. The number of Uyghurs who actively use Chinese as a second language has been increasing. The Uyghurs in Central Asian countries are basically trilingual. Most of them have, in addition to Uyghur, good command of Russian and other official languages of their countries. Together with Chinese, Uyghur also functions as a lingua franca in the region; thus, many Han-Chinese, Hui, Kazakh, Mongol, and Shibe residents of Xinjiang have good command of Uyghur.
