Karluk

Karluk is the southeastern branch of the Turkic family, taking its name from the Karluk tribal confederation whose varieties spread across Central Asia from the 5th to the 8th centuries; its chief later descendants are Uzbek and Uyghur.

Its first literary form was Karakhanid, the first Islamic Turkic literary language, written in Arabic script from the 1000s in the Kara-Khanid Khanate and exemplified by Yusuf Khass Hajib's Kutadgu Bilig and Mahmud al-Kashgari's Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk.

From Karakhanid came Khorezmian Turkic, the literary language of the Golden Horde in the 1200s and 1300s, laced with local Oghuz and Kipchak words. It in turn gave way to Chagatai, the shared Turkic literary tongue of the Chagatai, Timurid and Mughal realms, which carried Karluk speech in administration and letters from Kashgar to the Volga.