Uyghur language knowledge production in Soviet Kazakhstan: How academic institutions sustained transnational scholarship7 min read
On 17 June 2026, Shonzhy (Chundzha), a village of about 20,000 people and the administrative center of Kazakhstan’s Uyghur District, some 150 miles east of Almaty, made national news by hosting the second ÖRİK Fest, a festival devoted to the local apricot economy. The program combined produce fairs, press events, lectures and discussions by agricultural specialists, open-air concerts, crafts, food displays, and other cultural events. Local officials presented the festival as part of a wider effort to promote apricot cultivation, agrotourism, food processing, entrepreneurship, and export development in a district they described as Kazakhstan’s “apricot capital” (örik astanasy). The name of the festival, however, is linguistically revealing. The Kazakh-English portmanteau, built around the Kazakh word örik (apricot), leaves the district’s majority heritage language, Uyghur, unmarked. Despite the reduced public visibility of Uyghur in contemporary Kazakhstan, the country was one of the principal sites for the production of Uyghur language knowledge in the Soviet period.
Kazakhstan’s Soviet-era Uyghur language scholarship remains a pillar of identity for the country’s roughly 300,000 Uyghurs. In Almaty, a street named after the Soviet Kazakhstani Uyghur linguist Gozhakhmet Sadvakasov runs through the Dostyk (Dostluq) neighborhood, the city’s bastion of Uyghur culture and community life. A plaque honoring Sadvakasov hangs prominently beside street signs bearing the name of one of the most important scholars who have devoted their careers to the study, classification, standardization, and institutional support of the Uyghur language in Soviet Kazakhstan.
Sadvakasov belonged to a substantial scholarly infrastructure that made Soviet Kazakhstan a major center of Uyghur studies. The institutional framework began in 1946 with the establishment of a sector devoted to Uyghur-Dungan culture, became a more autonomous unit within the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR in 1949, passed through several reorganizations in the late 1950s, and took a more stable form in 1963, when a Department of Uyghur Studies crystallized around a dedicated cohort of Uyghur studies specialists at the Academy’s Institute of Linguistics. This institutional history culminated in 1986 with the creation of the Institute of Uyghur Studies. Across these decades, scholars from Soviet Kazakhstan conducted prolific research on Uyghur dialectology, literary-language formation, orthography, phonetics, historical phonology, lexicology, phraseology, grammar, lexicography, etymology, folk sayings and proverbs, language contact, and lexical borrowing. Their publications also addressed more specialized topics, such as Chinese lexical elements in modern Uyghur, paired words, syllable-level phonetic processes, and press vocabulary.
The scholars who contributed to Uyghur language scholarship in Soviet Kazakhstan came from various backgrounds and specializations. These intellectuals of Uyghur, Kazakh, and Tatar origin were shaped by the post-Stalinist Soviet academic world. Their major contributions came largely from the 1960s through the 1980s and reflected the reorientation of Soviet linguistics toward descriptive, historical, and comparative philology, with fieldwork, textual evidence, and comparative Turkology shifting away from the ideologically charged speculative framework of Nicholas Marr’s teachings that had been dominant throughout much of the Stalinist period.
Sadvakasov was a central member of this scholarly cohort. A native of the Uyghur District, he entered academia through the Academy’s Uyghur-Dungan culture sector. He later headed the Department of Uyghur Studies at the Institute of Linguistics and, in 1986, became the founding director of the Institute of Uyghur Studies. His scholarship ranged across Uyghur dialects in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, the speech of Fergana Valley Uyghurs, orthographic norms, literary-language development, modern Uyghur grammar and structure, and language contact in the Central Asian context. The scope of the scholarship around Sadvakasov is also visible in research by his junior colleagues on Uyghur dialects in other republics of Soviet Central Asia, much of which appeared under the auspices of institutions he led.
Another notable scholar whose work contributed directly to Uyghur language scholarship in Soviet Kazakhstan was Abduäli Qaydarov, a Kazakh from the Almaty region who completed graduate training in Uyghur linguistics in the early 1950s and also began his academic career in the Uyghur-Dungan culture sector. Qaydarov later held leading positions in Uyghur philological units before becoming one of Kazakhstan’s major figures in Kazakh linguistics and ethnolinguistics. His Uyghur-related scholarship addressed the modern literary language, paired-word constructions, lexicology, phraseology, grammatical description, literary-language development, and Uyghur-Kazakh comparison.
Tughlukjan Talipov represented another branch of this scholarly field. An Uyghur from the Almaty region, he built his career in the linguistic institutions of the Kazakh SSR Academy of Sciences. Talipov’s research focused particularly on Uyghur phonetics, historical phonology, vowel systems, and the phonetic development of the modern language. His comparative work on Uyghur and Kazakh further situated Uyghur language scholarship within the broader study of Turkic linguistic relations in Soviet academia.
Uyghur language scholarship in Soviet Kazakhstan also extended into the study of poetic form and classical textual heritage. Murat Khamraev, an Almaty-born Uyghur scholar trained in Tashkent and active in the Kazakh SSR Academy’s scholarly institutions, worked on Uyghur and Turkic versification, rhyme, oral poetry, riddles, tales, proverbs, and folk sayings, as well as Uyghur literary education. The work of another scholar, Savut Mollaudov, on classical Uyghur poetry and literary heritage further connected Soviet Kazakhstani Uyghur language scholarship to the study of older written traditions and the verbal forms through which Uyghur literary and oral culture was preserved, studied, and taught.
Uyghur language scholarship in Soviet Kazakhstan also intersected with a wider Sino-Soviet Turkological milieu shaped by scholars of Tatar origin who linked Kazakhstan with centers of Oriental and linguistic scholarship in Tashkent, Baku, Leningrad, and Moscow. Their work on Uyghur and other Turkic languages of the Sino-Soviet borderland supplied comparative material for Soviet Uyghur studies by drawing on research on Turkic-speaking communities across various provinces of China.
Edkhyam Tenishev was one of the most influential Turkologists whose work connected Soviet Uyghur studies to research on Turkic-speaking communities in China. A scholar of Tatar origin who grew up in Soviet Kazakhstan and received his advanced training in Leningrad, Tenishev conducted extensive research on dialect classification, dialect lexicon, and the relationship between modern Uyghur speech forms and older Turkic textual traditions. Working in a tradition associated with his mentor Sergey Malov, Tenishev’s comparative research also drew on Turkic-speaking communities across the Sino-Soviet border, including the Dolans in the Lopnur region, the Salars in Qinghai, the Sarygh-Yugurs (Yellow Uyghurs) in Gansu, and the Fuyu Kyrgyz in Heilongjiang. Through this combination of Uyghur dialectology and comparative research, Tenishev helped connect Soviet Uyghur studies to a wider Inner Asian Turkological field.
Emir Nadzhip represented another Tatar-origin strand in this scholarly constellation. Born in what is now Kazakhstan and trained across the wider Soviet Orientalist institutional framework, Nadzhip worked on Uyghur language pedagogy, lexicography, and the history of Turkic literary languages. His scholarship linked the study of modern Uyghur to older written traditions while also providing practical tools for Soviet institutions that taught, translated, and studied Uyghur.
Much of Soviet Uyghur lexicography was indebted to the work of a Tatar revolutionary who led a decades-long political career in China. Born in 1894 in the Kazan Governorate, Borhan Shehidi (Burgan Shakhidullin) was a Tatar politician and intellectual who served in both the Kuomintang and CCP governments in China. A fluent speaker of Tatar, Uyghur, Russian, and Chinese, Shahidi treated language knowledge as administrative and political capital. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he compiled a comprehensive Uyghur-Chinese-Russian dictionary that became an important lexicographical source for Uyghur language scholars in Soviet Kazakhstan who compiled numerous Uyghur dictionaries based on his work. In 1980, at the age of 85, he became the founding president of the Turkic Language Research Society of China.
As the Kazakh language becomes increasingly prominent in Kazakhstan’s public spaces, many Kazakh nationalists have called for the renaming of the Uygur District in recent years, alleging that the supposed foreignness of the administrative toponym is incompatible with a nationalizing state. Nevertheless, throughout much of the Soviet period, Kazakhstan was a principal setting for Uyghur language scholarship, thanks to a well-established institutional framework and an array of dedicated, accomplished scholars with deep ties to the country. The Uyghur language is therefore far from foreign to Kazakhstan. On the contrary, it has benefited immensely from the country’s very own intellectuals and institutions.
