Many of the remotest places we have heard of are islands in the middle of some large ocean, particularly the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. So today, why not let us turn this around, and find out, where in the world is furthest away from any sea or ocean? This includes places like the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water. This is often referred to as a continental pole of inaccessibility.

While Australia’s continental pole of inaccessibility lies in the Northern Territory, around 900km from the closest ocean, Africa’s pole of inaccessibility lies 1814km from the closest ocean. However, this pales in comparison with Eurasia’s pole of inaccessibility, which perhaps should not be too surprising given that it is the largest continent. This stands at around 2500km from the closest ocean. There are in fact, two Eurasian poles of inaccessibility were proposed, as the Gulf of Ob was and was not considered as part of the oceans for each proposed pole. However, the poles of inaccessibility are quite close to each other, located along the Kazakh border with Northwestern China, specifically in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China.

In political news, Xinjiang has come under international scrutiny for years for one primary reason — it is the site where a genocide is occurring. You might have heard about the so-called “re-education camps” or internment camps where horrific human rights abuses are occurring, from forced labour to forced sterilisation. Allegedly motivated by counterterrorism, these atrocities committed against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang are more accurately described as a forced assimilation of Xinjiang into China through ethnocidal means. With well over a million people currently interred in such camps, and potentially thousands of deaths as a result (exact numbers are, unsurprisingly, not transparent), the majority of these targeted people groups are called the Uyghurs.

It is grim to introduce the Uyghurs this way, but it is important to understand the scale at which Uyghur culture, and their language is at danger of being stamped out. Out of the 25.8 million residents in Xinjiang, around 12 million are ethnic Uyghurs, while 8-9 million are Han Chinese. Other minorities include Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Mongols, and various Turkic and Tungusic people groups. It is an ethnically diverse region, within an otherwise largely ethnically homogenous country. Although Mandarin Chinese, or known as Putonghua, is the official language of Xinjiang, the Uyghur language is also widely used in the region as well, attaining official language status alongside Mandarin Chinese.

The Uyghur language is a Turkic language under the Karluk Turkic branch, making it closely related to languages like Ili Turki, and relatively distantly, Uzbek. While Uyghur is predominantly spoken in Xinjiang, there are also speakers residing in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. It is split into three major dialect groups, namely the Central, Southern, and Eastern dialects, with Lop Uyghur being classified as a critically endangered language but falling under the Eastern Uyghur dialect group. The Central dialects are the predominantly spoken dialect group of Uyghur, accounting for around 90% of Uyghur speakers.

Uyghur has some interesting phonological rules. No diphthongs exist in Uyghur, and its nine or so phonemic vowels are by default, short. Some vowels could be long, representing a relic of some historical vowel assimilation, and some loanwords. Like some other Turkic languages, and Mongolian, Uyghur has a system of vowel harmony, where vowels of a certain type agree with similar vowels. There is also vowel reduction in Uyghur. The consonant sounds of Uyghur are, well, much less interesting. Perhaps the more unusual consonants to the English speaker are the uvular consonants, which are articulated further back in the mouth than the velar sounds /k/ and /g/. Consonants are also observed to undergo consonant harmony, which would affect the suffix attached to root words in Uyghur grammar.

Like many other Turkic languages, Uyghur is an agglutinative language, where suffixes are added to a stem word that gives more information concerning that word. Its word order is subject-object-verb, much like many languages in the region, but in contrast with the subject-verb-object of Mandarin Chinese. While nouns do not have grammatical gender, they are inflected for case and number. Although definitiveness in Uyghur is not really marked, the indefinite article could be indicated by the word bir (one). To make the plural, speakers use the suffix -lar/-ler.

Noun cases is one part of Uyghur grammar where I find a little bit of disagreement. Some sources report that Uyghur has six grammatical cases, while some others say that Uyghur could have as many as ten. Among this disagreement, what linguists agreed on is that Uyghur has the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, and locative cases, each conjugated by number, and following vowel and consonant harmony rules.

Perhaps one interesting bit about the Uyghur language are the words. Although most Uyghur words are of Turkic origin, the Uyghur people have had interactions with other linguistic groups for centuries, allowing loanwords to be incorporated into the Uyghur language. The most direct influences on Uyghur are the Uzbek, Kazakh, and the Chagatai languages, which are fellow Turkic languages. Words of Arabic origin entered Uyghur in two ways — through languages like Persian and Tajik, and through Islamic literature when Islam was introduced to the Uyghur people.

More recently, Mandarin Chinese and Russian have substantial influences on the Uyghur language, with words of German origin entering through Russian as well. Sometimes, code-switching between Uyghur and Mandarin Chinese are also observed, where words of Mandarin Chinese origin are mixed into Uyghur sentences in colloquial situations.

Uyghur today is written in a modified Arabic alphabet, with more diacritics added to represent sounds not found in Arabic, but are found in Uyghur. But it was not always written in the Arabic script. Prior to the introduction of Islam to the Uyghur people, the Uyghur language was written in the Sogdian alphabet, or more rather, an abjad. This appears to be derived from the Aramaic script, except that in addition to being written from right to left horizontally, Sogdian could be written left to right vertically. You might observe that the latter is the same writing direction as Mongol bichig. And you would be correct. Or almost correct. The Sogdian alphabet would eventually give rise to the Old Uyghur script. It was the Old Uyghur alphabet from which the Mongol bichig, and later, the Manchu alphabet, would be derived, although only using the vertical writing direction.

There was also a time Uyghur was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, as part of a failed effort from the Soviet Union to romanise the Uyghur language. And during the rising political tension between China and the USSR in the 1950s, the Chinese developed a modified Latin alphabet called the Uyghur New Script, and was in use for almost a decade before its eventual abolition in 1982. That year saw the return to the Uyghur Arabic alphabet, the alphabet the Uyghurs used since some time in the 10th or 11th centuries.

It should go without saying that Xinjiang is culturally rich with Uyghur culture, but it is this culture and language most at risk of being stamped out in China. Yes, it may still be spoken by millions today, but the survival of the Uyghur language is endangered by the ongoing atrocities. With this, carries a grim possibility that the use of the Uyghur language would be outlawed in schools and public spaces, reminding many of the various practices carried out in the past to stamp out indigenous identity in favour of the most dominant language of the region, like the Welsh with English, Cree, and Ojibwe with English or French. As the genocide carries on, drawing ire by many in the international community, activists, and regular people, the plight of the Uyghur language hangs in a rather shaky balance.