Uzbek is a Karluk Turkic language and the most widely spoken language in Central Asia, with roughly 35 million native speakers. It has the longest literary tradition of any Turkic language, built on the rich Classical Chagatai heritage — the prestige literary language of the Timurid and Mughal courts, in which the poet Alisher Navoi wrote masterpieces in the 15th century. Like other Soviet Central Asian languages, Uzbek was first given a Latin alphabet in 1929, then switched to Cyrillic in 1940. After independence in 1991, Uzbekistan adopted a new Latin-based alphabet, which became fully official in 1993 and is now used in all schools, official documents, and media. The Cyrillic version persists informally among older generations. Uzbek's Karluk branch sets it apart from the Kipchak languages of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, giving it closer lexical ties to Uyghur and Chagatai.
