Publication Details
Abstract
Border districts of Uzbekistan preserve long-standing, everyday contact between Uzbek and Turkmen speech communities, yet this contact has been studied mainly through lexical and phonetic description of the neighbouring Khorazm dialectal zone, while Olot District of Bukhara Region — an area with a documented Turkmen-descended population and toponymy — has received little dedicated attention. Based on field data collected in Olot District between 2023 and 2026 (over 300 lexical items and morphological forms recorded from dated, localized speakers), this article examines phonetic, morphological and lexical traces of Turkmen substratum influence in the speech of Uzbek–Turkmen bilinguals and analyses how these traces are distributed across generations. The findings show a consistent three-layer pattern: forms of clear Turkmen-Oghuz origin that remain stable in the speech of speakers aged 60 and above, forms that are currently in competition among middle-generation speakers, and an expanding set of standard-Uzbek forms among younger speakers (20–40). The article argues that the Olot bilingual system is best described as a case of morphological convergence in which the clause-level grammatical frame is Uzbek while a specific set of morphological exponents — case endings, negation, participle formation, diminutive suffixes — is supplied by a Turkmen-Oghuz source, and that this configuration is currently undergoing intergenerational levelling toward standard Uzbek.