Jamal speaking Uzbek and Northern

This video was recorded by Teddy Nee in Hsinchu City, Taiwan. Northern Uzbek is the variety of the Uzbek language spoken in Uzbekistan, whereas Southern Uzbek is the variety spoken in Afghanistan with greater influence from Arabic. Each descends from a later form of Chagatai, a Karluk variant of Turkic. Northern Uzbek bears significant influences from Arabic, Russian (from the rule of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union), and Persian. In fact Uzbek (both Northern and Southern) is the Turkic language with the largest amount of Persian influence. Northern Uzbek is the national language of Uzbekistan and its only official language. It is also the most widely spoken Turkic language, after Turkish. Uzbek is agglutinative like other Turkic languages, but is most similar to Uyghur, another Karluk language, with a less strict form of vowel harmony. Uzbek was historically written in the Arabic script, but that is generally no longer the case except in Xinjiang, China, where Uzbek is a minority language, and in Afghanistan. Northern Uzbek is now written in both the Latin script (officially) and Cyrillic, which became the official script in 1940 but ceased its official capacity in 1992 shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. Northern Uzbek is spoken internationally by nearly 19 million people. It is an Eastern Turkic language.