Khorezmian

The Khorezmians of this age are the settled townspeople and farmers of the Khwarazm oasis and Transoxianan cities, from Bukhara to Fergana. Their forebears included Iranian-speaking Khwarazmians and Sogdians, whose Eastern Iranian tongue survived in Khwarazm at least into the thirteenth century before giving way to Persian and Karluk Turkic.

Turkic rule came in the eleventh century with the Muslim Kara-Khanid khans; by the fourteenth century bazaar towns spoke Middle Turkic, wrote in Perso-Arabic script and kept Khwarazmian learning such as al-Biruni's. In 1337 the Transoxianan cities belonged to the fracturing Chagatai Khanate and the Khwarazm oasis to the Golden Horde. Timur later made Samarkand his Timurid capital, covering the region in mosques and madrasas.

From local Middle Turkic arose Chagatai, Central Asia's classical literary language, brought to its height by Ali-Shir Nava'i in the fifteenth century. When Muhammad Shaybani's Uzbek nomads conquered Transoxiana after 1501, they called the settled people Sart; these Karluk-speaking townspeople became the core of the later Uzbek nation under Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand.