Map of 1800s Central Asia showing Altishahr and Dzungaria, and the colonialist empires that controlled these regions.
Map of the Tarim Basin, with place names in Uyghur
Uyghurs are native to East Türkistan (which consists of Dzungaria and Altishahr aka Tarim Basin) and speak a Türkic language. Here is the history of the Uyghurs as a people, and how they got to speaking a Türkic language.
As I mentioned in my post on Indo-European migrations (https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/indo-european-migrations), around 3300-3000BC, some Proto-Indo-European speaking nomads we now call the Afanasievo moved on horseback to western Buryatia (west of Lake Baikal), where they would live for some time. At some point as early as 2000BC (Peyrot, https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/research/research-projects/humanities/the-tocharian-trek#tab-1) some of their descendants went further south into the Tarim Basin, and spread their language throughout the area, so that much of the Tarim Basin east of Xoten spoke a language descended from that of the Afanasievo. We call this branch of the Indo-European language family as Ārśi-Kuchean, after the names in those languages of two large Tarim Basin city-states where these languages were spoken- Ārśi and Kuśi (modern Qarasheher and Kuchar respectively). This language family is also called Tocharian, because their speakers were first identified with a people called Τόχαροι (Tókʰaroi) by the Greeks, now it is thought the Tókʰaroi actually spoke an Iranic language, in which they called themselves *tukʰāra-. *tukʰāra- are not Ārśi-Kuchean, Iranic and Ārśi-Kuchean are two separate branches of Indo-European. Yet confusingly people still call Ārśi-Kuchean languages the “Tocharian languages”. Throughout this post when I say “Tocharian” I mean Ārśi-Kuchean, not the Iranic *tukʰāra-.
In the 5th century CE, which is the earliest attestation of the Ārśi-Kuchean languages, there were all these city-states all across the Tarim Basin. the people of Qeshqer and Xoten spoke Saka, an Eastern Iranic (⊂ Aryan ⊂ Indo-European) language, while the inhabitants of what were at one point city-states-- Qarasheher (then Ārśi in Ārśi-Kuchean Tocharian A, Ārśe in Tocharian B), Kuchar (then Kuśi in Ārśi-Kuchean Tocharian B), Aqsu, Korla, and Turpan were all Ārśi-Kuchean-speaking (⊂ Indo-European). The people of Niye had in the 3rd and 4th centuries CE adopted an Indic language brought over by people who travelled across the Karakoram Highway from (what is now) Pakistan, called Niye Prakrit or Niya Gandhārī. This language had a lot of loanwords from an Ārśi-Kuchean language, suggesting that the population of Niye was bilingual.
Maps of where the Ārśi-Kuchean languages have been found (with modern borders superimposed onto it). There are three known Ārśi-Kuchean languages, creatively called Tocharian A, Tocharian B, and Tocharian C. Tocharian A and B was spoken/written from Aqsu to Turpan (Tocharian B was more spoken, Tocharian A more written/liturgical but is found more in Ārśi (Qarasheher) and east, while Tocharian B is found west and east of Ārśi1); Tocharian C found only in loanwords in Niye Prakrit attested in the area from Niye to Kroran (now ruins near Lopköl; Kroran is the Uyghur name for the ruins).
Eventually in the 600s CE the city states came under Táng control; in 632 CE Ārśi became a Táng protectorate but was attacked by the Táng in 644 CE after Ārśi declared alliance with the Western Türkic Khaganate. Táng control was ended by annexation of the Tarim Basin by the Tibetan Empire. By 800CE Dzungaria (as were other parts of what is today Russia-occupied Altay Region and Mongolia) was under control of the Uyghur Khaganate, while the Tarim Basin, largely Saka and Ārśi-Kuchean-speaking, was controlled by the Tibetan Empire. Türkic nomads were probably living throughout the Tarim Basin too, and likely had been for some centuries prior to 800CE too. Eventually in the middle of the 9th century CE some (Old Uyghur-speaking) Uyghurs moved south and established the Qocho state in the Tarim Basin, and this is when more Türkic nomadic migration to this region had intensified, and intermingling of the Türkic peoples with the local Ārśi-Kuchean and Saka peoples resulted in the population gradually shifting to a Türkic language, Old Uyghur.
Starting in the 1st century BC the peoples of the Tarim Basin, including the Ārśi-Kucheans, began converting en masse to Buddhism. When the area came under the control of the Qocho Uyghur Kingdom in the 9th century CE, the Uyghur immigrants began converting to Buddhism too; the influx of Türkic-speakers and intermarrying and cultural intermingling between the Old Uyghur (Türkic)-speaking population led to a cultural synthesis not unlike the Armenians and Urartians. And in both cases, the population eventually shifted to the Armenian and Old Uyghur languages. I'm not entirely sure why. Possibly patronage of Old Uyghur by the state meant there was more of an incentive for people in mixed families (which was likely most people by 9th century CE) to learn Old Uyghur from their relatives than an Ārśi-Kuchean language, and so the result was that by the 9th century CE (it is estimated, by uncited Wikipedia) Ārśi-Kuchean languages went completely extinct. Urartian likely underwent a similar story, but the old Kingdom of Urartu (9th-6th centuries BC) used Urartian as an official language, while there were communities of Proto-Armenian speakers. Despite their extinction, traces of Urartian live on in loans in Armenian (including place names, Yerevan < Urartian Erebuni) just as traces of Ārśi-Kuchean made it into loanwords in Old Uyghur (Peyrot) and possibly also in modern Uyghur certainly atleast the modern Uyghur placename Kuchar < Tocharian B Kuśi.
In light of familiar patterns of linguistic discrimination by 19th and 20th century states and empires, it is important to state that the ways these languages died out were not necessarily always as brutal as the familiar stories of imperialism, subjugation, discrimination, war and genocide. In some cases people simply all eventually switch to a language to ease communication with certain other people, and that just ends up sticking-- this is what happened in Dagestan for example with the spread of Dagestani languages up the mountains, and by the time Russian colonists got to Lezgistan, they were doing a rather acephalous form of social organization in villages (not complete anarchy, due to hierarchy in the household, but all household male representatives took part in a direct-democratic town council). So there are all kinds of ways in history people decided to switch languages, without being colonized. What happened in historic Tarim Basin / Altishahr East Türkistan and Armenia to drive those language shifts might have been anything, I have to do further research. But the research I have done so far suggests it was not done through immense violence or discrimination against Ārśi-Kuchean or Urartian speakers (even though the real imperialist colonizers, the Chinese and Turkish and Azerbaijani states, try to promote narratives that there was) because both peoples patronized each other's cultures and saw each other as very similar related peoples, in custom and culture. Armenian and Udi enjoyed such a relationship too, from the 2nd century CE atleast onwards.
REAL QUICK, ON OLD UYGHUR LANGUAGE AND MODERN UYGHUR LANGUAGE- Eventually the Uyghurs (Old Uyghur-speaking) were one of the first Türkic people to convert to Islam, they did this en masse in the 10th century CE. The Uyghurs’ conversion to Islam inspired other Türkic peoples to adopt Islam, including the Oğuz Türks, whose descendants include the Türkmen, the Qashqai nomads of Iran, and the Seljuks. The Modern Uyghur language is actually not descended from Old Uyghur, but is a kind of cousin of Old Uyghur. Modern Uyghur descends from the Chagatai Türkic language which was used as the official language of the Chagatai Khanate which came to control all of East Türkistan (as well as Bukhara, Tashkent, Samarqand, Kabul and surrounding areas) by the late 13th century, and remained a literary language of the former Chagatai-controlled regions of modern-day O'zbekiston (Uzbekistan) and East Türkistan. And thus the people of East Türkistan underwent a second language shift from Old Uyghur (in the Siberian branch of Türkic) to Chagatai (in the Karluk branch of Türkic), which then evolved into Modern Uyghur.
The westernmost part of China is and was back in the 100s BCE the Qash Qowuq / Yùmén Guān (Pass of the Jade Gate), now in Gānsù Province. The Tarim Basin and Dzungaria (East Türkistan) is not China. And it never really has been. It was for the first time in the 1st century BC that the Chinese state (the Hàn dynasty in this case) ruled over the Tarim Basin directly, establishing the Protectorate of the Western Regions (Old Chinese: 西域都护府 *s-nˤər [ɢ]ʷrək tˤa [ɢ]ʷˤak-s p(r)oʔ) before a rebellion by some Qiang people (native to the foothills of eastern Amdo, Tibet, now western Sìchuān Province) resulted in the Hàn state to abandon their colonial ambitions to control the Tarim Basin for Silk Road for more tax revenue. But various dynasties would make continued stint attempts to colonize ancient East Türkistan every 200 years or so that would keep failing -- the previously mentioned attempt by the Táng in the 600s included. Instead various other states, as I mentioned, came to rule the Tarim Basin and Dzungaria for much longer sustained periods of time - including the Tibetan Empire and various Türkic states like the Qocho Uyghur kingdom and the Chagatai Khanate. Eventually the area came under the dominion of the (ethnically Dzungar Mongolic) Dzungar Khanate. Then, as I mentioned in my introductory post on Chinese imperialism (https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/chinese-imperialism-in-the-20th-and), Tibet and Xīnjiāng/East Turkestan (then the Tarim Basin and Dzungaria) were both annexed by the Chinese empire under the Qīng dynasty, in wars with the Dzungar Khanate. Tibet was conquered by the Dzungar Khanate in 1717, then by the Qīng in 1720, and then in 1755 the Qīng went to war with the Dzungar Khanate, did a genocide of the Oirat people in Dzungaria, and established the entirety of East Turkestan as “Xīnjiāng”, meaning “new frontier”. And that's when Chinese colonialism started, which I"ve written about at length already especially as it pertains to East Türkestan here, mostly focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries, including the ongoing Uyghur genocide-
https://abhishaikasya.substack.com/p/chinese-imperialism-in-the-20th-and
The Uyghur genocide is real. I don't do genocide denial. There are way too many refugees for them to all be making up the same stories.
Uyghurs are native to East Türkistan, are a result of an intermixing between Ārśi-Kuchean and Saka peoples whose language-bearing ancestors migrated from the north and west back in 3000BCE and post-1000BCE respectively, with Türkic peoples who migrated from the north and east for quite some time but heavily from the 9th century CE onward. Chinese fascists disagree, they think that Uyghurs are solely the Türkic people and claim that Hàn dynasty’s colonial ambitions precede Uyghur presence in East Türkistan— while this is technically true, Uyghurs are partly descended from the original Saka-speaking and Ārśi-Kuchean-speaking inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, and so have a continuity with the indigenous lifeways of the Tarim Basin, and are indeed (one of) the native people of the Tarim Basin. The Hàn dynasty’s colonial ambitions meanwhile, are just, well, colonial ambitions that were soon abandoned.
Hàn Chinese are not native to East Türkistan, their presence, as speakers of Sinic languages in East Türkistan, has either been throughout history as random foreigners or increasingly since the 1950s, as state-sponsored settlers whose migration to East Türkistan is encouraged by cheaper living to facilitate continued resource extraction and increasingly since atlatest the 1990s, a regime of basically racial segregation (between Hàn and Uyghur neighborhoods of large cities) and genocide of Uyghurs.
but I am guessing, that Tocharian A was based on the spoken Ārśi-Kuchean dialect of Ārśi. After all Xuanzang reported that the Aqsu dialect of Ārśi-Kuchean was quite different from the main Kuśi dialect (Kuśi dialect is equivalent to what we call “Tocharian B”) (source- Li, Rongxi. Translator. 1996. The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research. Berkeley, California).
Btw, Xuanzang’s name in Middle Chinese (spoken during his lifetime) was 玄奘 — either huen dzangX, or huen dzangH.t