The dead language that Uzbek and Uyghur both call their ancestor
For centuries poets and rulers across Central Asia wrote in Chagatai, a Turkic literary language. Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, wrote his memoirs in it. By the early 20th century it was extinct, and new Soviet republics were competing to claim it, with Uzbekistan relabelling it Old Uzbek.
Chagatai took its name from the khanate of Genghis Khan's second son, and many of the Turkic peoples who used it claimed descent from that state. It belongs to the Karluk branch of Turkic and grew out of Middle Turkic, the older common tongue of the region, absorbing a large share of Arabic and Persian vocabulary and phrasing. It was written in a version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet later known as Kona Yëziq, the old script, and was used from Crimea and the Volga-Ural region to Xinjiang.
Its golden age is tied to one poet. Ali-Shir Nava'i is counted as the greatest writer in the language, so much so that Chagatai is sometimes called Nava'i's language. The scholar Mehmet Fuat Köprülü dates the classical period from the publication of his first divan in the second half of the 15th century. Nava'i also wrote a detailed comparison of Chagatai and Persian, arguing that his Turkic tongue was the better literary medium, even though Chagatai writers deliberately modelled their work on Persian literature.
Prose flourished as well. Besides Babur's memoir, Timur's biography was written in Chagatai, and in 1507 Muhammad Shaybani, ruler of the new Bukhara khanate, dedicated an essay in it to his son. The 17th and 18th centuries are usually seen as a decline, when Persian regained ground, although the Khivan ruler Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur wrote plain-style genealogies of the Turks and Turkmens, and the poet Magtymguly carried it into Turkmen literature.
Politics shaped how it was remembered. In 1921 Soviet planners considered making Chagatai the official language of Uzbekistan but found it too archaic and built a new standard from Uzbek dialects. Renaming it Old Uzbek, argued historian Edward Allworth, badly distorted the region's literary history. In China it is sometimes called ancient Uyghur. Uzbek and Uyghur are its direct descendants, while Kazakh and Turkmen, from other branches, were strongly influenced by it.
Source: Chagatai language
