Uzbek

Last Updated: 2020-07-02

Background

Language Family: Turkic / Common Turkic / Karluk / Uzbek

• Uzbek is spoken throughout Uzbekistan and Central Asia.

Phonology

Consonants

• /ʒ/ and /ts/ appear in Russian loanwords (Ismatulla and Clark 1992, vii–viii; Sjoberg 1963, 7–8).
• /ʔ/ appears in some Arabic loanwords (Sjoberg 1963, 20–21).
• Sjoberg (1963) argues for /ɸ/ rather than /f/; /f/, in her view, is limited to loans (pp. 7-8).
• Sjoberg (1963) writes /x/ rather than /χ/, but describes it as “postvelar, almost uvular” (p. 11), so I have chosen to follow Boeschoten (1998) in interpreting the sound as /χ/ (p. 359).
• /w/ varies with voiced bilabial and labiodental fricatives (Sjoberg 1963, 13).
• (Uzbek-English Dictionary 1980) argues for /ʁ/ rather than /ɣ/ (p. xviii).
• Most consonants have contrastive gemination (Sjoberg 1963, 41).

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	p b	t d			k ɡ	q
Affricates			tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f	s z	ʃ		ɣ	χ	h
Nasals	m	n			ŋ
Flaps		ɾ
Approximants	w	l		j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless, whereas those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• Some sources list the grapheme ⟨ъ⟩ as marking length on preceding vowels, but none of my sources have made any indication that length is contrastive in Uzbek.

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
High-Mid			o
Low-Mid	ɛ		ɔ
Low		a

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
а	/a/
б	/b/
в	/w/	/v/ in some loanwords
г	/ɡ/
ғ	/ɣ/
д	/d/
е	/ɛ/; /jɛ/	/ɛ/: word-medially; /jɛ/: word-initially
ё	/jɔ/
ж	/dʒ/	/ʒ/ in some loanwords
з	/z/
и	/i/
й	/j/
к	/k/
қ	/q/
л	/l/
м	/m/
н	/n/
о	/ɔ/
п	/p/
р	/ɾ/
с	/s/
т	/t/
у	/u/
ў	/o/
ф	/f/
х	/χ/
ҳ	/h/
ч	/tʃ/
ш	/ʃ/
ъ	/j/	before ⟨е⟩; marks (non-phonemic) vowel length (postvocalically) - see note above
э	/ɛ/
ю	/ju/
я	/ja/
ь		marks palatalization of preceding consonant; only occurs in Russian loans
ц	/ts/	only occurs in Russian loans
Digraph
нг	/ŋ/

Lenition Rules

• Many speakers spirantize /k/ and /q/ (Boeschoten 1998, 359).
• /ɡ/ sometimes approximantized to [j] in casual speech (Sjoberg 1963, 21).

Misc. Rules

• Velar stops palatalize before front vowels, especially rounded ones (Sjoberg 1963, 10).
• /j/ is produced with lax articulation next to high front vowels (Sjoberg 1963, 13).
• Some speakers lower /ɔ/ to [a] in various words (Sjoberg 1963, 39).

References

Boeschoten, Hendrik. 1998. “Uzbek.” In The Turkic Languages, edited by Johanson, Lars and Csató, Éva Á., 357–78. Routledge.

Ismatulla, Khayrulla, and Larry Clark. 1992. Uzbek Language Competencies for Peace Corps Volunteers in Uzbekistan. Peace Corps of the United States.

Sjoberg, Andrée F. 1963. Uzbek Structural Grammar. Indiana University Publications.

Uzbek-English Dictionary. 1980. Oxford University Press.