Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "audio that helps develop listening and speaking skills as well as videos that were filmed in different regions of Xinjiang, China."--Page 4 of cover.

The current volume presents a selection of 126 texts in Uyghur posted in public spaces, translated, and annotated for this book. The author started photographing Uyghur texts in 2008 at the time of the Beijing olympics and continued to do so during 2009, the year of the so-called “Urumqi uprising” of July 5. This event generated a stream of texts posted in public spaces that reflected the efforts made by the authorities to re-establish control. In the course of his travels in the years thereafter the author continued to add to the corpus of photographed Uyghur texts. At the same time he started collecting, as comprehensively as possible, various types of folders, brochures, handouts, and product wrappings with texts illustrating aspects of Uyghur culture and society. The texts, published here for the first time, are primary source materials documenting a wide variety of aspects of daily life of the Uyghurs in Shinjang. The implicit messages or explicit references contained in many of these texts give them significance as clues towards an understanding of the existential realities they reflect or illustrate.

This volume presents a synchronic description of the phonology, morphology and lexicon of a local variety of modern Uyghur, which is mainly spoken in Turfan, one of the famous ancient cultural centres in the Silk Road. It includes three descriptive chapters, a rather large corpus of texts and a dialect vocabulary. Descriptive chapters focus mainly on actual and uniform phonological, morphological and lexical features distinguishing this local dialect from the standard form and other regional varieties of modern Uyghur, whereas the text part provides a comprehensive and reliable linguistic sample of all possible regional varieties of the Turfan dialect and presents a corpus of oral history and folk literature of the Turfan region, reflecting ethnological and geographical peculiarities of the local settlements. All data are given in International Phonetic Alphabet together with a direct translation as well as with linguistic and extra-linguistic explanations.

Modern Uyghur is an Eastern Turkic language. Most of the seven to ten million native speakers of Uyghur live in northwestern China, where Uyghur is also the lingua franca of various other ethnic groups. A smaller Uyghur-speaking community is politically and culturally active in Central Asia. As the predominant indigenous language in a crucial area that bridges the frontiers of multiple states, and as a language of great interest to comparative linguists, Uyghur is increasingly important. This book has become one of the standard works on Modern Uyghur, and there is no comparable Western work on the modern standard language. With this book, both scholars and those who simply want a basic working knowledge gain access to Uyghur as it is spoken today. This book's primary purpose is to teach conversational skills. No familiarity with the structure of Turkic languages is assumed, and the material is appropriate for both self-instruction and classroom use. For those familiar with other Turkic languages, it demonstrates the characteristics specific to Uyghur and provides useful reading practice in Roman- and Arabic-based script. Spoken Uyghur also contains an extensive description of the morphophonology and orthography of the language, and fifteen instructional dialogue units, with extensive notes explaining grammar and customs. Of particular value are the Uyghur-English and English-Uyghur indexes and a reference guide to inflectional patterns. Also included is a reinterpretation of previous scholars' contributions to the study of Turkic languages, as well as a description of the current state of Uyghur language.

Presents an overview of the living, endangered, and extinct languages of the world, providing the total number of speakers of the language, its history, and maps of the geographic areas where it is presently spoken or where it was spoken in the past.

Meticulous renderings depict 9 dolls and 46 authentic costumes, including work clothes, winter wear, wedding outfits, more. Broad-brimmed, elaborately decorated hats and leg o' mutton sleeves for the women, derbies, walking canes, starched collars for the men. Descriptive notes.