Annotated sources

This is a long-form essay about Anar Sabit, a Uyghur woman who was detained in a concentration camp in Xinjiang. It provides background on some of the policies in China which the government uses to justify its detainment of Uyghurs.

This is a really fascinating, really useful article about WeChat – the most popular social networking app in China where filters and restrictive government policy limit what its citizens can talk about online – and its relationship to Uyghur, where communities of native speakers congregate to discuss the language, silly mis-translations, and other topics deemed appropriate. Over the past few years, the Uyghur diaspora community outside of China has made great strides to include and recognize Uyghur in virtual spaces, while China has been curtailing it. The article includes a call to action to expand Uyghur awareness online to prevent it from further minimization.

This is a map I use on my infographic to display where in China the Uyghur language is spoken. I chose this map because it shows how linguistically diverse China is, but still emphasizes how much of a monopoly that Mandarin has on the country's use of language.

This article highlights the achievements of members of the Uyghur diaspora who bring the Uyghur language and culture outside of China through dance, music, poetry, and food. Language is a great symbol of culture, and I think that this article details that well.

Elise Anderson is a scholar on Uyghur music and language, and she describes the popularity and signifiance of Uyghur music in Xinjiang here, including Xinjiang's spinoff of The Voice, and its traditions of folk music, which we can look to as examples of where languages reflects cultural values and personal experience.

I've learned a lot about how the art of poetry is beloved by Uyghurs, and how we rely so much on the preservation of Uyghur poetry to understand the significance of its language. Uyghur poets are of course among those who are detained in Uyghur, and Kuo argues that if we lose its writers, we are on a fast-track to losing the language.

Three universities in the U.S. have considerable Uyghur programs of study: Indiana, KU, and Harvard. KU's East Asian Studies has provided a free eTextbook which provides a (very thorough) introduction to the language. There's a lot of new information to me in this textbook, and I tried to distill its section on phonology into a micro blog post, since phonology is an example of language at its most basic stage, before all those affixes and harmonies and agglutinates enter the picture.

Getting to Know U(yghur)