Chagatai language

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The Chagatai language (Ottoman Turkish:جغتای ; Çağatay in modern Turkish) is an extinct Turkic language which was once widely spoken in Central Asia and most of Khorasan region. The word Chagatai relates to the Chagatai Khanate, the western part of the Mongol empire, which was left to Genghis Khan's second son Chagatai Khan. Many of the Chagatai Turks and Tatars who were the speakers of this language, claim descent from Chagatai Khan.

It was developed as a sophisticated written language using the Arabic alphabet. It was heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian, and incorporated much of the nomadic Turkish, and served as a lingua franca in Central Asia. It can be divided into three periods: 1. Pre-classical chagatai 1400-1465, 2. Classical Chagatai 1465-1600 and 3. Post-classical Chagatai 1600-1921. The first period is a transitional phase caracterized by the retention of archaic forms, the second phase starts with the publication of Mir Alisher Navoi's first divan and is the highpoint of Chagatai literature, and the third phase is caracterized by two bifurcating developments. One is the preservation of the classical Chagatai language of Navoi, the other trend is the increasing influence of the dialects of the local spoken languages. Uzbek and modern Uyghur are the two modern languages most closely related to Chagatai. In Uzbekistan, then a part of the Soviet Union, Chagatai was not replaced by a literary language based on the local Uzbek dialect until 1921.

Its last speaker is thought to have died in the 1990s.

Famous Chagatai literature: The most famous of the Chagatai poets is Mir Alisher Navoi. This is attested by the fact that Chagatai is sometimes called Nava'i's language. Among the prose works Baburnama, also known as "Tuska Babure" written by first Mughal Emperor Babur is highly regarded.

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