☰ Contents · Uzbek language

World languages and the Uzbek language

Lessons 1–2 · 2 lessons · N.M. Mahmudov, A. Nurmonov, A.Sh. Sobirov. Ona tili (Uzbek language), Grade 9, 4th edition. “Tasvir” Publishing House, Tashkent, 2019
1

The Uzbek language among the world’s languages

Textbook: pp. 5–6
GoalExplain world languages, language families and the place of Uzbek in the Turkic family.
New words
language family · til oilasirelated languages · qarindosh tillarancestor (proto-)language · ajdod tilstate language · davlat tili
Explanation

There are about 7,000 languages on Earth and they are grouped into several language families. Languages that share many features and developed from one ancestor language are called related languages; languages far from each other are not related. One of the biggest families is Indo-European, which includes English, French, German, Russian and Persian. Uzbek belongs to the Turkic family, which also includes Turkish, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Tatar, Uyghur and Azerbaijani. Other families are, for example, Sino-Tibetan (Chinese) and the Afro-Asiatic family, which the book calls “xom-som” (Arabic). Uzbek is developing as the state language of the Republic of Uzbekistan.

Worked examples
Related words: Uzbek “ot” (horse) and Turkish “at”, Uzbek “tuz” (salt) and Turkish “tuz”, Uzbek “ko‘z” (eye) and Turkish “göz” — such similarity shows that Turkic languages come from one ancestor.
Classification: Uzbek – Turkic family; English – Indo-European; Chinese – Sino-Tibetan; Arabic – Afro-Asiatic (“xom-som”).
Class activity

“Family tree”: draw a tree with four big branches on the board; pupils stick cards with languages (Kazakh, German, Chinese, Arabic, Turkish, Russian) on the right branch.

Practice
1
What are related languages?
2
Which family do English, French and German belong to?
3
Name the family of Uzbek and three related languages.
4
Why are Uzbek and Kazakh counted as related?