Southern Uzbek

Southern Uzbek, also known as Afghan Uzbek, is the southern variant of the Uzbek language, spoken chiefly in Afghanistan and Pakistan with up to 4.6 million native speakers. It uses the Perso-Arabic writing system in contrast to the Uzbek spoken in Uzbekistan and other former Soviet countries in Central Asia. It is written in the Nastaliq hand of calligraphy.

Southern Uzbek is intelligible with the Northern Uzbek spoken in Uzbekistan to a certain degree. However, it has differences in grammar and also many more loan words from Dari, the local New Persian variety, in which many Southern Uzbek speakers are proficient; on the other hand, Northern Uzbeks have absorbed loanwords from Russian (in which many Northern Uzbeks are proficient) since their integration to the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.

From Wikipedia · Southern Uzbek language · CC BY-SA 4.0