Abstract:

Northern Afghanistan, which appears in historical sources with names like `the embankment of Turkestan`, `Lower Turkestan`, Sothern Turkestan`, has been populated by Turkic peoples for almost one thousand and five hundred years. The region is still mainly populated by Uzbeks and Turkmens. Uzbeks are the third largest ethnic group in the country and the Turkmens the fourth. Particularly in the last century Turkic peoples have been deprived of education in their mother tongue as a result of totalitarianism and internal disorder. Here at in the region, where Ali Sher Navai and Huseın Bayqara the founders of Eastern Turkic Literature had produced their work and which had been a centre of Turkic literature for centuries, Turkic has mainly become a language of poetry in the last century. The official language in Afghanistan is Dari=Persian. The minorities have obtained the opportunity to conduct education in mother tongue with a recent regulation. Uzbeks of Afghanistan, who are inheritors of the Classical Eastern (Chagatai) Turkic, still maintain the tradition of poetry. However, they also are under the influence of the written and poetical language developing in the north in the Republic of Uzbekistan. Uzbeks and Turkmens in Afghanistan are still using the Arabic script. The contemporary situation in the use of scripts in the modern-day Turkestani republics, where the Arabic script had been used for almost a millennium in the past, is as follow: the Latin script is used in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the Cyrillic script in Kirgizia, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. In the Chinese controlled autonomous republic in Eastern Turkestan an Arabic based script, which has nothing to do with the historical Chagatai and Ottoman alphabets, is used. When all these are taken into consideration it could be said that Classical Eastern (Chagatai) Turkic written language is maintained only in Southern Turkestan (Afghanistan) by Uzbeks and Turkmens. It is seen that significant dualities and contradictions are present in the Uzbek poetical language of Afghanistan as a result of influences from various sources like the classical poetry tradition, the Dari-Persian language and the standard language of Uzbekistan.

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