Chagatai

Chagatai (چغتای, Čaġatāy), also known as Turki, Eastern Turkic, or Chagatai Turkic (Čaġatāy türkīsi), was a Turkic language that was once widely spoken across Central Asia. It remained the shared literary language in the region until the early 20th century when it went extinct. It was used across a wide geographic area including western or Russian Turkestan (i.e. parts of modern-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan), Eastern Turkestan, Crimea, the Volga-Ural region (such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan), etc.

Chagatai is the direct ancestor of the Uzbek and Uyghur languages. Kazakh and Turkmen, which are not within the Karluk branch but are in the Kipchak and Oghuz branches of the Turkic languages respectively, had been nonetheless heavily influenced by Chagatai for centuries.

Ali-Shir Nava'i was the greatest representative of Chagatai literature.

From Wikipedia · Chagatai language · CC BY-SA 4.0