Uyghur Language Research Articles

Language, Cultural Identity, and Spirituality —A Case Study of the Representation of Minority Ethnic Subjects in Chinese Ethnographic Documentary

AbstractSince the 1990s, there has been a surge in ethnographic films by Han directors in China, highlighting the complex interplay of power dynamics between these filmmakers and the minority communities they portray. This study examines these dynamics through the lens of spirituality and cultural representation, focusing on the film “Ashiq: The Last Troubadour.” A case study and interviews with the director, Liu Xiangchen, reveal an essentialist portrayal of the Uygur Ashiq that emphasises their spiritual and cultural identity on Uighur language chant, inadvertently reinforcing Han dominance. The analysis suggests that while the director's intentions reflect a critical self‐awareness, the film perpetuates the marginalisation of the Ashiq. We argue that ethnographic cinema should offer a more nuanced depiction of ethnic minorities and their minority language to challenge social injustices further and promote inclusivity in China's diverse linguistic and cultural landscape.

ON THE USE OF HISTORICALREDUPLICATIVESIN THE MODERN KAZAKH LANGUAGE

In modern Kazakh language, one of the Turkic languages, historical reduplicatives are widely used. Currently, double words in written monuments written in ancient Turkic languages are used in the Kazakh language without any changes. Since reduplicativesare common among the ancient Turkic languages in the ancient Uighur language, our article considered reduplicativesin the modern Kazakh language and the ancient Uighur language. The article found that some words were used as is, without anychanges in sound, structural and semantic terms, which is confirmed by examples. It has been shown that some reduplicativesused since the time of the ancient Uighurs have undergone minor changes, that is, some of them have undergone changes in the secondword in the modern Kazakh language.The purpose of the article is to find out, no matter how many centuries have passed between them, some words in two Turkic languages (one old, one modern) are used in both languages as is. To reveal and show the continuation between the two Turkic languages. The article is of great scientific and practical importance in studying the process of determining the territory in which the ancient Turkic languages were used, and step-by-step changes. In the scientific work, methods and techniques of comparativeanalysis, grouping, translation were used, an analysis of the origin of some words widely used both in the ancient Uighur language and in the modern Kazakh language was achieved. While writing this article many works in the ancient Uighur languagewere used.The relevance of the article lies in the fact that this topic has never been used in Kazakh science in the Kazakh language and has not entered scientific circulation. The article can be used as an auxiliary textbook inthe disciplines “History of Kazakh literature”, “History of Turkic literature”, “Introduction to Turkology”.

Some Сomments on Usage of Analytical form <i>-p bar-</i> in the Old Uyghur Language

This article examines the use of the analytical form -p bar- as a means to express aspectual meanings and the conditions for its use. In the Old Uyghur language, which is considered one of the early stages of development of Turkic languages, morphological means are used to clarify the nature of actions. One of these means is the analytical form -p bar-. In studies on the Old Turkic and Old Uyghur languages, the use of the analytical form -p bar- to express the aspectual meaning of punctual action has not been previously noted. From this point of view, functional characteristics of this form’s use are investigated in the study. Analyzed examples serve as evidence that the Old Uyghur language had grammar means of expressing the aspectual meaning of punctual action.

Research on the Training and Application Methods of a Lightweight Agricultural Domain-Specific Large Language Model Supporting Mandarin Chinese and Uyghur

In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the lack of support for minority languages, especially Uyghur, the scarcity of Uyghur language corpora in the agricultural domain, and the lightweight nature of large language models remain prominent issues. This study proposes a method for constructing a bilingual (Uyghur and Chinese) lightweight specialized large language model for the agricultural domain. By utilizing a mixed training approach of Uyghur and Chinese, we extracted Chinese corpus text from agricultural-themed books in PDF format using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, converted the Chinese text corpus into a Uyghur corpus using a rapid translation API, and constructed a bilingual mixed vocabulary. We applied the parameterized Transformer model algorithm to train the model for the agricultural domain in both Chinese and Uyghur. Furthermore, we introduced a context detection and fail-safe mechanism for the generated text. The constructed model possesses the ability to support bilingual reasoning in Uyghur and Chinese in the agricultural domain, with higher accuracy and a smaller size that requires less hardware. It (our work) addresses issues such as the scarcity of Uyghur corpora in the agricultural domain, mixed word segmentation and word vector modeling in Uyghur for widespread agricultural languages, model lightweighting and deployment, and the fragmentation of non-relevant texts during knowledge extraction from small-scale corpora. The lightweight design of the model reduces hardware requirements, facilitating deployment in resource-constrained environments. This advancement promotes agricultural intelligence, aids in the development of specific applications and minority languages (such as agriculture and Uyghur), and contributes to rural revitalization.

A popular text in eastern Turki: Isnad-i Nadi Ali

The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the studies on Eastern Turki, as it is called in Western literature, which grew upon Chagatay under the improving influences of Kashgar and Yarkend dialects in the east at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century. This written language (Eastern Turki) has been used particularly in manuscripts created by common people. Thus, a manuscript with the title Isnad-i Nadi Ali in the genre of attribution of supplications that has not been discussed in any other papers has been analyzed descriptively in this article. The mentioned manuscript, which is the essential material of this article, is between folios 66a and 71b of the miscellaneous manuscript held in the Bodleian Library under the number MS. Ind. Inst. Pers. This article consists of an introduction and five sections. The introduction provides general information about Eastern Turki and the popular texts in this literary language. The depiction of the manuscript, phonetic (vowel harmonies and phonetic changes), and morphologic (derivational and inflectional suffixes and other morphemes) aspects have been scrutinized in the initial three sections. The fourth section comprises the transcription of the manuscript. This paper's fifth section contains the grammatical index of the vocabulary of the text.

Collaborative Encoding Method for Scene Text Recognition in Low Linguistic Resources: The Uyghur Language Case Study

Current research on scene text recognition primarily focuses on languages with abundant linguistic resources, such as English and Chinese. In contrast, there is relatively limited research dedicated to low-resource languages. Advanced methods for scene text recognition often employ Transformer-based architectures. However, the performance of Transformer architectures is suboptimal when dealing with low-resource datasets. This paper proposes a Collaborative Encoding Method for Scene Text Recognition in the low-resource Uyghur language. The encoding framework comprises three main modules: the Filter module, the Dual-Branch Feature Extraction module, and the Dynamic Fusion module. The Filter module, consisting of a series of upsampling and downsampling operations, performs coarse-grained filtering on input images to reduce the impact of scene noise on the model, thereby obtaining more accurate feature information. The Dual-Branch Feature Extraction module adopts a parallel structure combining Transformer encoding and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) encoding to capture local and global information. The Dynamic Fusion module employs an attention mechanism to dynamically merge the feature information obtained from the Transformer and CNN branches. To address the scarcity of real data for natural scene Uyghur text recognition, this paper conducted two rounds of data augmentation on a dataset of 7267 real images, resulting in 254,345 and 3,052,140 scene images, respectively. This process partially mitigated the issue of insufficient Uyghur language data, making low-resource scene text recognition research feasible. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed collaborative encoding approach achieves outstanding performance. Compared to baseline methods, our collaborative encoding approach improves accuracy by 14.1%.

Whose English gets paid off?—Neoliberal discourses of English and ethnic minority students’ subjectivities in China

AbstractThe study traces the trajectories of Uyghur college students’ subjectivity construction and transformation from Foucault's governmentality perspective. Drawing on ethnographic data of two telling cases, it explores how minoritized students’ subjectivities were linked to neoliberal discourses of English and constituted by power techniques, self‐technologies, and affective dispositions embedded in wider institutional transformations. Participants were found experiencing a shift to the individualistic subjectivity associated with academic achievement and performance in English away from the collective identity of “authentic Uyghur” symbolized by the Uyghur language. Two salient discourses of English, i.e., English as constraints, and English as academic excellence, emerging from the neoliberal‐oriented institutional English language education policies and practices, shaped the participants either as incompetent English learners or elite subjects. Participants learned to responsibilitize themselves through such self‐technologies as confession and preaching, and affective practices. Yet, technologies of hope and optimism became for a few the enjoyment of experiences and performance of elitism while projecting a majority disadvantaged as affectively problematic others. The self‐technologies and affective responses without recognition of larger structures of inequality could further reinforce the neoliberal logic. The affective labor of sense of solidarity, commitment to community, empathy for the deprived ones with critical reflection and collective action, nevertheless, may counter neoliberal logic and point to an alternative path to meaning‐making and social relations.

A Three-Stage Uyghur Recognition Model Combining the Attention Mechanism and Different Convolutional Recurrent Networks

Uyghur text recognition faces several challenges in the field due to the scarcity of publicly available datasets and the intricate nature of the script characterized by strong ligatures and unique attributes. In this study, we propose a unified three-stage model for Uyghur language recognition. The model is developed using a self-constructed Uyghur text dataset, enabling evaluation of previous Uyghur text recognition modules as well as exploration of novel module combinations previously unapplied to Uyghur text recognition, including Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (CRNNs), Gated Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (GRCNNs), ConvNeXt, and attention mechanisms. Through a comprehensive analysis of the accuracy, time, normalized edit distance, and memory requirements of different module combinations on a consistent training and evaluation dataset, we identify the most suitable text recognition structure for Uyghur text. Subsequently, utilizing the proposed approach, we train the model weights and achieve optimal recognition of Uyghur text using the ConvNeXt+Bidirectional LSTM+attention mechanism structure, achieving a notable accuracy of 90.21%. These findings demonstrate the strong generalization and high precision exhibited by Uyghur text recognition based on the proposed model, thus establishing its potential practical applications in Uyghur text recognition.

Two Stories Written in Eastern Turki as Part of the Swedish Missionary Work (Svenska Missionsförbundet) in East Turkistan

Religious texts are written in understandable language due to their instructive and preaching characteristics. Although different methods are used in these texts, the form of ‘narration/storytelling’ is prominent. In this article, two stories, ‘The House of Hasan’ and ‘The Story of the Nightingale,’ which were published in Eastern Turki by Swedish missionaries in the East Turkistan region with the Swedish Mission Press, are evaluated by considering their stylistic features. While these stories were written in Eastern Turki, Arabic and Persian words, which the public often saw in works related to the Islamic religion, were also frequently used. Such linguistic choices are related to the source person’s message to the receiver and the importance of the receiver’s easy understanding of the text.

The Corresponding Expression of Chinese Directional Verbs in Uyghur Language

Directional verbs have always been a difficult point in teaching, translating and learning Chinese grammar. Scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of research on them, but most of them focus only on directional verbs or only on individual words in Chinese-Uyghur directional verbs. There is little systematic and comprehensive research on the corresponding expressions of Chinese-Uyghur directional verbs. Based on previous studies and the theoretical foundation of comparative linguistics, this paper discusses the corresponding expression rules of directional verbs in Uyghur from four aspects: the grammatical meaning of simple directional verbs, compound directional verbs and directional verbs, and the difference between directional verbs and object positions. Through comparative analysis, the structural patterns and rules of different languages will be found, which will provide a certain scientific basis for the learning of Chinese-Uyghur languages and also play a certain auxiliary role in second language teaching.

‘Farewell, My Uyghur Language’: Linguistic anxiety and resistance in Uyghur poetry and songs, 1990s–2010s

AbstractIn recent decades, as part of the efforts of the Chinese government first to integrate and, more recently, to forcibly assimilate the Uyghur population into China’s mainstream culture and society, the Uyghur language has been marginalized and repressed to an unprecedented extent. The academic literature on Xinjiang’s language policy has repeatedly acknowledged that this repression is a major source of concern and discontent among many Uyghurs. However, to date, little has been written about the public response of Uyghurs to this policy and their open efforts to challenge it. In particular, with very few exceptions, little is known about the public response of Uyghur writers and artists. In this article I analyse a large corpus of Uyghur poems and songs that engaged openly with the Uyghur language crisis and were published and disseminated in the Uyghur public sphere between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s. Unlike some studies that try to assess the condition of certain languages at a certain point in time through objective methodologies, these literary and artistic works provide an insider view on how the Uyghur cultural elite and many other Uyghurs experienced the repression and loss of their native language, and also, how they struggled against this repression. In the article I examine the diverse sentiments, perceptions, and discourses that these literary and artistic expressions communicate, and the different strategies that the Uyghurs used to struggle against the language policy and its consequences. I also explore what these works tell us about the development of Xinjiang’s language policy over time, the linguistic reality in the region, and the impact that the language policy has had on Uyghur society. Finally, the article also investigates the broad political meanings of these works and speculates on the link between them and the efforts of the Chinese government to further marginalize the Uyghur language.

Genocide or Vicissitude: A Study on the Effects of Language Education Policies Shift for Uyghur in Xinjiang, China

Language education has profound implications for multiple dimensions of society. Zooming into one of the most populous ethnic minority groups within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, this study examines the reciprocal effects of language education policy on the social role of Uyghurs based on several crucial policy documents. Influenced by multiple factors, including political, societal, cultural, and historical aspects, education on the Uyghur language for the Uyghur people has mainly been weakened. Instead, Mandarin studies became mandatory as part of the minority education system. This study was conducted with methodologies of onsite ethnographic study and interviews to approach the question from a qualitative perspective. Following the macroscopic perspectives, findings reveal that the policies positively impacted Uyghurs economically but raised difficulties for them in inheriting their ethnic cultures. At the same time, implications are discussed following the microscopic perspectives. Finally, concentrating on an individuals self-construal and social identity establishment, it argues the high possibility of the young generation of Uyghur falling under a self-identification crisis when not mastering their mother tongue, the Uyghur language.

Aspects of early Chinese global lexical copies surviving in Modern Uyghur

Abstract The Modern Uyghur language has a large number of lexemes copied from Chinese in different periods of Uyghur. Amongst them, there is a special group of lexemes globally copied from Chinese first into the Old Uyghur literary language which is documented in the texts written in various scripts from the 8th to the 14th centuries. Some of these global lexical copies were transmitted to the next stages of Uyghur and are established in Modern Uyghur as part of its lexicon. This paper discusses aspects of this special group of lexemes from the four points, semantic reinterpretation, fusion in form and meaning, multiple copying of the same lexeme, and additions to the lexicon. The aim is to illustrate some important aspects of the historical Sino-Uyghur linguistic and cultural contact reflected in these copies and to provide Uyghur examples to understand aspects of diachronic development of copied lexemes in the recipient language.

Perfect in the Old Uighur Language

The article discusses the semantic nature of the Turkic perfect, its semantic zone limitations and possible grammar tools of expressing Perfect in the Old Uighur language. Goals. The study aims to determine grammar tools of expressing Perfect meanings in the Old Uighur language. Morphological tools that are able to perform the meanings included into the semantic zone of Perfect are being studied. Perfect and description of its semantic zone are connected with the concepts of aspect, actionality and ways of verbal action. In this regard, the issue of the relevance of these terms, in relation to the Old Uighur perfect, is under discussion. The grammar tools expressing Perfect are studied according to the point of view that excludes Aspect as a grammar category in the Turkic languages. Studying aspectual and temporal meanings of Perfect diachronically on the basis of the Od Uighur material may give a hint to understand the Turkic perfect and its expressions in genetically related modern languages. Functional-semantic and typological methods are used to identify and describe morphological tools with a perfect meaning. Scripts of the Old Uighur language, dated back to 10th–11th centuries, are of biographical and religious-philosophical content. Work with scripts, comprehension of existing theoretical approaches to understanding Perfect as an element of aspectual functional-semantic field show that Perfect meanings in the Old Uighur language are expressed by morphological tools that can be correlated with models. The study concludes that means expressing the Perfect meaning in the Old Uighur language are able to mark temporal localization and/or aspect.

The Eastern Turkic Translation of Kalila wa-Dimna

Kalila wa-Dimna is a version of Panchatantra, a work comprising the writings of Indian oral culture, extended across a long period of time. With these extensions of time, in fact, entirely new works were created in different languages and cultures. Translations of Kalila wa-Dimna were made in both the Eastern Turkic areas and in Anatolian lands. For this study, a translation of Kalila wa-Dimna into Eastern Turkish, archived in Sweden with the Lund University Library’s Jarring Collection (Prov.) 46, has been examined. The book contains 97 pages with 10 lines on each page. The work under examination was brought to Sweden from the Eastern Turkistan region by the Swedish orientalist Gunnar Jarring. The language of the work is similar to a dialect spoken in the Kashgar-Yarkant area. Despite having aspects of Eastern Turki, this Kalila wa-Dimna translation contains different phonological features.

Көне ұйғыр тіліндегі септіктердің зерттелу барысы

The article discusses the process of researching the ancient Uighur dialects. Although studies of the ancient Turkic languages have been developed in Kazakh science, it can be said that the study of the ancient Uyghur language, a branch and a large branch of these ancient Turkic languages (a large branch, according to foreign scientists, means the ancient Uyghur language - the language of the third Turkic Khaganate), was left without attention. To fill this gap, we reviewed the progress of the study of syllogisms using the works of prominent scientists who studied the ancient Uyghur language. Adverbs play an important role in connecting words in a sentence. In general, our goal, when we write about declensions, is to once again make sure that there is no big difference between the declensions of the Old Turkic language, including the Old Uyghur, and the declensions of modern Turkic languages, and analyze some of them. their features. In the article, we focused on the research of foreign and domestic correspondent scientists on adverbs and tried to compare them. We studied the statements of scientists about adverbs by methods of analysis, comparison and discussion.

Проблемы прародины и этнических корней бурятской группы сэгэнутов

The article is devoted to the consideration of the origin of one of the main components of the tribal composition of the Western Buryats, known as “Segenut”. The relevance of this study is due to the insufficient study of the ethnic origins of the ancestral group, the territory, and the time of the formation of the West Buryat group. The study is based on general scientific research methods. Comparative historical and textual methods are also used. Analysis of ancestral traditions and texts of shamanic invocations of Buryats shows that the origin of the Buryat group of Segenuts was associated with the territory of northwestern Mongolia and adjacent areas of southeastern Tuva. These territories are located within the boundaries of the biosphere reserve, called the Ubsunur basin. This is indicated by the analysis of toponymic names found in folklore and texts of the sacred tradition of the Segenuts. This is also evidenced by the ethnonymy reflected in the legends of the Buryats. This made it possible to identify the ethnic origins of the Segenuts, going back to the Uriankhai/Turkic basis. This basis makes up a significant layer of the original population of the Ubsunur basin. A significant argument in favor of this is the reference to the Uighur language of the ancestors of the Segenuts. This language is captured by the shamanic folklore of the Buryats. It is known that language is one of the basic elements in ethnic identification. Language stands out as a key factor in the definition of an ethnic group in various scientific concepts. At the same time, it is impossible not to note the marking of the Segenuts as Uriankhais in folklore, representations and traditions of the Buryats. This also gave reason to believe that the Segenuts are not autochthons of the Cis-Baikal region, but a migrated part of the Turkic-speaking society, close in origin to the Tuvan groups Soyan and choodu. That is, the Segenuts are the descendants of the Turkic-speaking ethnic group who became Buryats. In this regard, a version has been put forward about the time of their migration. It was provoked by the unstable situation in Western Mongolia and Southern Siberia in the 15th–16th centuries. Perhaps the situation was connected with the desire of the Oirats as a leading ethno-political association, who tried to expand their zone of influence to neighboring territories. This led to civil strife, military actions and the outflow of the population to other regions.

Improving the performance of Uyghur speech recognition based on Factorized Time-Delay Neural Network

Speech recognition systems have low accuracy in recognizing the Uyghur language, a low-resource language, due to its strong language specificity and few public training datasets. Given this problem, considering the characteristics of Uyghur, we use morpheme units to build a language model and use mixture data augmentation methods to expand the training data. A 9-layer TDNN-F is applied, which can effectively utilize contextual information. An optimal 9.88% WER (Word Error Rate) is achieved in experiments on the open-source dataset THUYVG-20. Compared to the baseline system of this dataset, the WER is reduced by 6.7%, which significantly improves the accuracy of the Uyghur speech recognition, and provides a reference in other low-resource languages for speech recognization.

Book Review] Catalogue of the Old Uyghur manuscripts and blockprints in the Serindia Collection of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS. Vol. 1. Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2021. 386 p.

The work under review is the first volume of the catalogue of ancient Uyghur manuscripts and xylographs preserved in the Institute of Oriental manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St Petersburg). This is the largest collection of texts and documents transcribed in the ancient Uyghur language in Russia. The catalogue is subdivided into 12 thematic sections. They comprise descriptions of 564 ancient Uyghur fragments, altogether 601 entries. The publication is accompanied by three prefaces, extensive scholarly introductions in Russian and English languages, as well as indexes and facsimiles of most documents.

Oʻzbek va uygʻur-arab alifbosining qarindoshlik munosabatlari (Abdulla Qodiriyning “Oʻtkan kunlar” asari uyg‘urcha tarjimasida aks etgan singarmonizm hodisasi misolida)

During the early 20th century, most literary works were written using the Perso-Arabic script. Abdullah Qodiriy, the pioneer of modern Uzbek literature, also extensively used the same script in his early writ-ings. However, the first edition of his novel “Bygone Days” was printed in the new Uzbek-Arabic script that emerged in the 1920s. This script later evolved into the Uyghur Arabic alphabet. In other words, Qodiriy’s work sheds light on the transitional period of the Chagatai Turkic literary lan-guage, which was on the brink of splitting into the modern Uyghur and Uz-bek dialects. This research briefly compares the new Uzbek-Arabic script used in “Bygone Days” to the Uyghur-Arabic script used in the 1982 Uy-ghur translation of the same work. Through this study, the ethno-linguistic relations between the two nations can be traced to some extent. Addition-ally, the phonetic changes in the Uyghur language, particularly the umlaut phenomenon, were analyzed in the context of historical backgrounds.