Uzbekistan - Languages

Uzbek, the state language, was the most widely spoken non-Slavic tongue in the USSR. It is a Turkic language with six vowels— virtually identical to those of Tajik, which has surely influenced it—rather than the original eight or nine. In 1993, it was decided that the language would be written in the Roman alphabet rather than in the Cyrillic alphabet. In 1999, Uzbek was spoken by 74.3% of the population in Uzbekistan; Russian was spoken by 14.2%; Tajik by 4.4%; and other various languages by 7.1%.