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The 'Chagatai language' ( ''Çağatay''; Turkish: 'Türkçe' , Chagatai: 'جغتای' ''Jaghatāy''; Uyghur: 'چاغاتاي' ''Chaghatay''; Uzbek: ''Chig'atoy'') is an extinct Turkic language which was once widely spoken in Central Asia. It is considered to be the old Uzbek language. The word 'Chagatai' relates to the Chagatai Khanate, the western part of the Mongol empire, which was left to Genghis Khan's second son Chagatai Khan. Many of the Chagatai Turks and Tatars who were the speakers of this language claimed descent from Chagatai Khan.
It was developed as a sophisticated written language using the Arabic alphabet. It was heavily influenced by the Arabic and Persian languages, and incorporated much of the nomadic Turkic, having thus served as a lingua franca in Central Asia. It can be divided into three periods:
# Pre-classical Chagatai 1400-1465
# Classical Chagatai 1465-1600
# Post-classical Chagatai 1600-1921
The first period is a transitional phase characterized by the retention of archaic forms; the second phase starts with the publication of Mir Alisher Navoi's first Divan and is the highpoint of Chagatai literature, followed by the third phase, which is characterized by two bifurcating developments. One is the preservation of the classical Chagatai language of Navoi, the other trend is the increasing influence of the dialects of the local spoken languages.
The Chagatai Turkic language lived its heyday in the Timurid Empire. Furthermore, Timurs biography is written in Chagatay Turkic as is also the famous Baburnama of Babur, the Timurid founding the Mughal Empire. Uzbek and modern Uyghur are the two modern languages most closely related to Chagatai. In Uzbekistan, then a part of the Soviet Union, Chagatai was replaced by a literary language based on the local Uzbek dialect in 1921.
Its last speaker is thought to have died in the 1990s.

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Literature

Bibliography

External links

Literature

The most famous of the Chagatai poets is Mir Ali Shir Nava'i. This is attested by the fact that Chagatai is sometimes called "Nava'i's language". Among the prose works, Baburnama, which is also known as "Tuska Babure" and was written by first Mughal Emperor Babur, is highly regarded.

Bibliography

★ Eckmann, J., ''Chagatay Manual (Uralic & Altaic)'': 1997, ISBN-10: 070070860X ISBN-13: 978-0700708604 [[1]]

★ Bodrogligeti, András J. E., ''A Grammar of Chagatay'' (Languages of the World/Materials 155): 2001 repr. 2007, [http://www.amazon.de/Grammar-Chagatay-Andr%C3%A1s-J-Bodrogligeti/dp/389586563X [ISBN 389586563X]]

External links

★ Russian imperial policies in Central Asia by ''H.B.Paksoy''