Russian loanwords began to enter Uzbek almost as soon as the southern tier of Central Asia came under Russian rule in the second half of the nineteenth century. During the Soviet period, the influx ...of Russian terminology was accelerated and greatly expanded. This did not, in fact, result in the abolition or obsolescence of large numbers of words of Arabic/ Persian origin, but for the most part, introduced new terms to fill gaps in the existing vocabulary. There was also a marked Russian influence on phraseology and, to a lesser extent, on syntax. In the 1980s there was a reaction against this trend. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union this has become more pronounced and there are now some moves to 'cleanse' the language of Russian accretions.
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Fortunately, I am not the only academic who has prayed for an assignable, up-to-date, well-integrated survey of Central Asian and Russian history—a book, that is, like Shoshana Keller's Russia and ...Central Asia. The book's subtitle refers to the three broad periods by which Keller organizes this history: first, an age of “coexistence” during which “Slavic and Turkic peoples shared the steppe” (p. 2); second, the age of Russian conquests in the region; and third, the age of “convergence” during which “Russians and Central Asians both went through communist shock modernization and became connected to global commercial culture” (p. 2). Arabic speakers might wince at the sight of “Mawrannahr” (missing a crucial “a”: pp. 3, 4, etc.); Uzbek speakers might grimace to see the word bitta (“one” or “a single”) translated as “two” (p. 228); and experts on the eighteenth century might gripe that their favorite era gets short shrift (“as usual!”).
