Uyghur

Uyghur may refer to:

Uyghur language

The Uyghur or Uighur (/ˈwiːɡər/)language (Uyghur: ئۇيغۇر تىلى Uyghur tili), formerly known as Eastern Turki, is a Turkic language with 8 to 11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Significant communities of Uyghur-speakers are located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and various other countries have Uyghur-speaking expatriate communities. Uyghur is an official language of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and is widely used in both social and official spheres, as well as in print, radio, and television, and is used as a lingua franca by other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

Uyghur belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family, which also includes languages such as Uzbek. Like many other Turkic languages, Uyghur displays vowel harmony and agglutination, lacks noun classes or grammatical gender, and is a left-branching language with subject–object–verb word order. More distinctly Uyghur processes include, especially in northern dialects, vowel reduction and umlauting. In addition to influence of other Turkic languages, Uyghur has historically been influenced strongly by Persian and Arabic, and more recently by Mandarin Chinese and Russian.

Uyghurs

The Uyghurs /ˈwiːɡər/ (Uyghur: ئۇيغۇر‎, ULY: Uyghur ;[ʔʊjˈʁʊː]; Old Turkic: ;Chinese: 维吾尔族; pinyin: Wéiwúěr zú) are a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia. Today, Uyghurs live primarily in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, where they are one of 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities.

An estimated 80% of Xinjiang's Uyghurs live in the southwestern portion of the region, the Tarim Basin. Outside Xinjiang, the largest community of Uyghurs in China is in Taoyuan County, in south-central Hunan. Outside of China, significant diasporic communities of Uyghurs exist in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, and in Turkey. Smaller communities are found in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Canada, and the United States.

They practice Islam and are a physically diverse ethnic group ranging from Western Eurasian (Europeans, Middle Eastern) to a more mixed race and East Asian appearance.