Overview
Uyghur is spoken by more than 11 million people in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as well as by tens to hundreds of thousands of Uyghur nationality living in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, all in the former Soviet Union.
The vocabulary includes many words borrowed from Han (Mandarin), Arabic, Persian, Russian, and other languages. In Europe, it also includes loan words from Turkish. Uyghur also has a vowel harmony feature, but it is much more irregular than other Turkic languages.
Old Uyghur which was written in the Uyghur script from the 9th to 16th century in western East Asia and Central Asia, is a separate language. Therefore, to distinguish it from Old Uyghur, Uyghur is sometimes called Modern Uyghur or New Uyghur.
