Uyghur | History, Language, & Facts
Uyghur, Chinese (Pinyin) Weiwu’er, also spelled Uygur or Uighur, a Turkic-speaking people of interior Asia. Uyghurs live for the most part in northwestern China, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; a small number live in the Central Asian republics. There were some 10,000,000 Uyghurs in China and a combined total of at least 300,000 in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in the early 21st century. The Uyghur language is part of the Turkic group of Altaic languages, and the Uyghurs are among the oldest Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia. They are mentioned in Chinese records fr...