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I'll be right up front by saying that I always spell the name as "Uyghur" because doing so helps me pronounce the name more like the way the Uyghurs themselves say their ethnonym.  If I spell the name as "Uygur", it has more of a tendency to come out sounding like a slur on an American ethnic group.

"EXPLAINED: What’s the controversy over ‘Uygur’ vs ‘Uyghur’?  Beijing’s use of the former ignores Uyghurs’ preference and aims to sow division: experts" By Kurban Niyaz for RFA Uyghur (2024.09.10)

Recently, a China-based New Zealander who’s a columnist for the Shanghai Daily generated a stir when he declared on X that “Uyghur” — referring to the 12 million-strong ethnic group living in northwestern China — should be spelled in English without an “h.”

Andy Boreham, who has a history of using his social media platforms to propagate Beijing’s political messages, says the word should be spelled “Uygur,” per a Chinese government directive back in 2012.

This upset linguists and Uyghur advocates alike, who said the alternative spelling was incorrect, ignored Uyghurs’ preference and played into Beijing’s attempts to divide the Uyghur people.

Boreham, whose Chinese name is An Boran, said that the use of “Uyghur” with an “h” would be banned on all social media platforms or websites published in China. “The central government has ordered it, so it must be followed,” he wrote in the Sept. 6 post.

So be it.  That's that.  Logic with Chinese characteristics.

But there's more to it than the CCP's ex cathedra proclamation.  There's also history, culture, and phonology.

The Uyghurs are a Turkic, mostly Muslim ethnic group living in what is today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China — which Uyghurs prefer to call East Turkestan. 

They trace their roots in the region back centuries. The term “Uyghur” first appears on inscriptions on standing stones in present-day Mongolia dated to the 7th century.

In recent decades, the Uyghurs have been subjected to oppression and human rights abuses by the Chinese government that the United States and other Western governments have labeled a genocide. 

Since 2017, an estimated 1.8 million have been herded into concentration camps, and thousands have been imprisoned. China says the facilities are job training sites to provide skills and alleviate poverty, and that most of the camps have been shut down.

Why is this alternative spelling a big deal to Uyghurs?

Members of the mostly Muslim ethnic group overwhelmingly prefer the spelling “Uyghur” because it more closely approximates the proper orthography and pronunciation in their native language. 

To propose another spelling is disrespectful — and promotes division within the Uyghur community, they say.

“A white colonialist who works for another colonial empire is trying to tell us Uyghurs how to write and read our own national name. Who does he think he is?” said Dilnur Reyhan, president of the Paris-based European Uyghur Institute.

Boreham’s assertion may seem small, but it employs a familiar tactic from the Chinese government’s playbook — to sow division, said Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, vice chairman at the World Uyghur Congress.

By trying to get some Uyghurs to embrace the spelling “Uygur” without the “h,” China wants to create a version of Uyghurs who are members of the big China family, he said, separate from other Uyghurs.

This approach aligns with China’s long-standing political slogan: “Break their roots, break their connections, and break their origin,” he said.

Similarly, China has also replaced “Tibet” in official documents with “Xizang.”

Hassan said that having two spellings would cause confusion in online searches and could hinder access to important information.

“The risk is that we could lose parts of Uyghur history, literature, traditions, and even the ongoing Uyghur genocide in these searches,” he said.

How has this name been rendered over time?

“Uyghur” contains sounds that aren’t easily rendered in English. When spoken, it sounds closer to “oy-gher” than “wee-ger,” as most Westerners enunciate it.

One early original source in English for the history of the region, British explorer T. D. Forsyth’s “Report of a Mission to Yarkand in 1873,” refers to the “Uighur” people. Other early spellings include “Ouighour” and “Ouigour,” derived from French and German scholars' renderings.

What is the basis for Boreham’s assertion?

Previously, China had included an “h” in the English spelling. An official directive issued on Oct. 11, 2006, from the Committee for the Language and Writing of the People’s Republic of China used “Uyghur.”

But on May 15, 2012, the China Daily, the English-language newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party, reported that the word had been officially standardized as “Uygur.” 

Since then, official Chinese websites, including those of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region People’s Government and Chinese embassies in the United States and Europe, have used the “Uygur” spelling. 

What do experts say?

Scholars and experts on the region rejected the latest call for a spelling change.

The word “Uyghur” is one of the most commonly used terms in Turkology in the Western world, and it is also used to refer to the script known today as Old Uyghur, they say. 

Similar terms, like “Afghanistan” or “Mughal Empire” are often rendered with “gh” in Western languages because the “gh” sound does not exist in English. This is why Boreham’s suggestion to remove the “h” from the English form of “Uyghur” has been widely criticized.

Timothy Grose, a professor of China studies who is an expert in ethnicity and ethnic policy in China at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana, said Boreham’s dictum was “completely wrong.” 

“The sound here is closer to ‘gh,’ so it is most accurately expressed with that spelling,” he said.

“It neglects that Uyghurs themselves have their own culture and their own language, and it is really the duty and obligation of others to see this language and culture for its itself and on its own terms,” he said.

Juha Janhunen explains his own stance:

My preferred spelling is Uighur, pronounced Weeger [wi:gər]. Since there is no sequence /ui/ in English it becomes automatically /wi:/, which is why we also have to say "a Uighur" and not "an Uighur". An alternative would be [ju:igər], as in Buick [bju:ik], but I do not know if anyone uses this pronunciation.

Marcel Erdal provides an extensive phonological-philological analysis of the problem:

The third sound in the name of the Uyghurs is pronounced as a voiced uvular fricative, like what is spelled with gh in the name of Afghanistan, phonetic symbol [ʁ]. It is quite similar to the second sound in Greek εγώ ‘I’, but that is a voiced velar fricative [γ], i.e. a bit less back than [ʁ]. There is a tradition in the west to spell these fricatives, which do not exist in the major Western European languages and therefore has no standard western spelling, with the letter combination gh; but this is just a convention. (Danes, Dutch and Ukrainians have other ways for spelling this sound.) The Italians use this letter combination for expressing the sound [g], the voiced velar stop/plosive, before front vowels, as in the proper name Gherardo.

The Septuagint scholars translating the Old Testament into Greek had this problem when transcribing the name of the city which is now, in the west, called Gaza. In Arabic, the name is غَزَّة , with the Arabic letter ghain, غ. Also already in Philistine times, there was a voiced uvular fricative in its onset, which was, in the 3^rd cent. A.D., translated into Greek with the letter γ (which originally represented a stop – but I am not sure till when). Beside ghain, غ, Arabic also has a voiced uvular approximant, ^cain, ع. Classical Hebrew united these two sounds into the sound ^cain, so the Hebrew name of the city has an ^cain in its onset. But the Septuagint translators, who lived in Egypt, appear to have had local knowledge about the name of the place, and did not adopt the Biblical variant (as known today, at any rate).

The 11^th century Turkic scholar Maḥmūd has a number of examples for the name of the Uyghurs, which he spells with the Arabic letter ghain, غ. But Arabic generally has no [g], so the Arabs did not need a letter for writing this sound. The Persians do have the sound [g], so they invented a letter for it (adopted by the Ottomans), but Maḥmūd uses the ‘normal’ Arabic alphabet (I’m not sure the Persians actually already invented the letter for [g] in the 11^th century), so he had no choice if he wanted to write a voiced velar or uvular sound.

I am not going to go here into the possibilities which the medieval Uyghurs had when using the (Indian) Brāhmī alphabet and the Semitic alphabets for naming their ethnicity and language, nor the Tang and later transcriptions of the name (discussed by Peter Zieme, a.o.); that is a big topic.

Note that Jarring, e.g., calls the language ‘Eastern Turki’; the wider modern adoption of ‘Uighur’ / ‘Uyghur’ in the West took place, I believe, not much longer than a century ago.

Based on the Uyghurs own phonology and orthography, which should it be — Uyghur or Uygur?  I always use the spelling with "gh" as more respectful and, I believe, more accurate.

 

Selected readings

• "Xinjiang Uygur" (8/7/19)
• "4 Uygur Theater" (6/12/09)
• See here for dozens of Wikipedia articles having to do with Uyghur language, people, culture, and history.  There's even a Uyghur Wikipedia that was launched in June of 2012; here's the article on Uyghur language from it.
• "Uyghur language" == simple English Wikipedia
• "Growing up Chinese in Uyghurstan" (12/26/21)
• "Uyghurstan or Uyghuristan?" (6/25/19)
• "Uyghur, Cantonese, and other valuable languages of China " (2/20/16)
• "A confusion of languages and names " (7/8/16)
• "Gibberish Uyghur " (9/28/09)
• "Uyghur basketball player " (6/24/18)
• "Uyghur as a 'dialect' — NOT" (6/28/13)
• "Uyghur as ornament " (9/19/13)
• "Uyghur language outlawed in schools of the Uyghur Autonomous Region " (8/1/17)
• "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns " (7/15/09)
• "Education in Xinjiang " (1/13/15)
• "Pulled noodles: Uyghur läghmän and Mandarin lāmiàn "  (8/8/14)
• "'Carrot' in Persian, Urdu, Uyghur, Sinitic, Vietnamese, etc." (7/26/20)
• "A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns" (7/13/09)
• "Outlawed Uyghur names" (10/10/15)
• "Chinese Authorities Ban Muslim Names Among Uyghurs in Hoten" (9/24/15)
• "Yaourter" (7/21/09)
• "UIGHUR NAMES PRONOUNCED." (7/13/09) — includes this proclamation by Language Hat:

I will issue my standard disclaimer that English spellings and pronunciations are for the use and convenience of English speakers, and it is foolish and presumptuous to expect them to sound correct to speakers of other languages. I seriously doubt that a Uyghur speaker’s rendition of, say, “New York” would pass muster to an English speaker, and that’s as it should be. Different languages are different.

which he has sensibly adumbrated in diverse variations on his blog.

[h.t. Arthur Waldron]

October 4, 2024 @ 9:17 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and politics, Pronunciation, Spelling, Variation

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