The Uzbeks have played an important role in their region since the beginning of the fifteenth century, when present-day Uzbek began to take shape in the fifteenth century during the modern Turkic period.

At that time, a strong cultural movement advocating the use of Uzbek emerged, which led to the creation of a rich Uzbek literature, a large part of which remains unstudied. The literary language of the period has Arabic and Tajik influences especially in the area of word borrowing.

The development of written Uzbek has undergone some dialectal shifts. The first postrevolutionary standard was based on the dialect of Turkistan (Comrie 1981), in the north of the Uzbek-speaking area.

Subsequently it was decided to shift the standard dialect and base it on the dialect of the capital city, Tashkent. Thus, current standard Uzbek is based largely on the dialect of Tashkent and differs considerably from the earlier standard.