Southern Uzbek, also known as Afghan Uzbek, is the southern variant of the Uzbek language, spoken chiefly in Afghanistan and Pakistan with up to 5.7 million native and secondary speakers. It uses the Arabic writing system in contrast to the Uzbek spoken in Uzbekistan and other former Soviet countries in Central Asia.
Southern Uzbek is intelligible with the Northern Uzbek spoken in Uzbekistan to a certain degree. However, it has differences in grammar and also many more loan words from Dari, the local New Persian variety, in which many Southern Uzbek speakers are proficient; on the other hand, Northern Uzbeks have absorbed loanwords from Russian (in which many Northern Uzbeks are proficient) since their integration to the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.
Southern Uzbek is written using the Arabic writing system called Arab Yozuv ùñè ÃÂçòÃÂà("Arab Script"). The writing system is for the most part identical to Perso-Arabic alphabet, with three additional letters. These include two vowels, "çà/ ÃÂ" and "çà/ ÃÂ" (optional in writing, and substitutable in practice by "çà/ ÃÂ" and "çà/ ÃÂ" respectively), which are meant to represent the sounds represented in Uzbek Latin Script with "E e" and "Oû oû". The alphabet also includes a combined consonant letter "ÃÂï", formerly (and currently in writing systems such as Uyghur) shown with the letter "ÃÂ". This letter represents the sound /à Â/, and represented in the Latin writing system with "-ng". This letter makes the Voiced velar nasal sound, where in English one can for example hear when pronouncing the word "wingman".
Uzbek has six vowels, and it has lost its vowel harmony rules, unlike other Turkic languages.
Other than the additional combined letter "ÃÂï / -ng", the consonants of Uzbek Arabic Alphabet are identical to that of Persian. Thus, there indeed is a case of various letters representing the same sound, as is the case in Persian. But the letters "ëàÃÂàðàÃÂàõàöà÷àøàù" are not used for writing of native Uzbek words. They are solely used for writing of loanwords from Arabic, Persian, or any of the European languages.
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