Loanwords in Uyghur in a Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

Modern Uyghur is one of the Eastern Turkic languages which serves as the regional lingua franca and spoken by the Uyghur people living in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China, whose first language is not Mandarin Chinese. The number of native Uyghur speakers is currently estimated to be more than 12 million all over the world (Uyghur language is spoken by more than 11 million people in East Turkistan, the Uyghur homeland. It is also spoken by more than 300,000 people in Kazakhstan, and there are Uyghur-speaking communities in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Mongolia, Australia, Germany, the United States of America, Canada and other countries). The Old Uyghur language has a great number of loanwords adopted from different languages at different historical periods. The loanwords come from sources such as ancient Chinese, the ancient Eastern Iranian languages of Saka, Tocharian and Soghdian of the Tarim Basin. Medieval Uyghur, which developed from Old Uyghur and Karakhanid Turkic, is in contrast to Old Uyghur, is a language containing a substantial amount of Arabic and Persian lexical elements. Modern Uyghur was developed on the basis of Chaghatay Turki, which had also been heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian vocabularies. After the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the strong Arabic and Persian lexical influence weakened and, instead, modern scientific and technological vocabulary got borrowed from European languages via Russian and Central Asian Turkic languages began to increase in proportion. From the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s, the lexical influence of Chinese became increasingly stronger. Since the middle of the 1980s, on the other hand, there has been a tendency to replace Chinese loanwords with indigenous word formations, loaned translations or international terms copied from Russian. This paper will discuss the loanwords in the Uyghur language and their historical and socio-cultural backgrounds. At the same time, we will clarify these loanwords by looking at the basis of current Uyghur studies and other sources for the purpose of elucidating the historical and socio- cultural backgrounds of Uyghur linguistic development.