Uyghur, a Turkic language that uses the Arabic alphabet, has about 10 million native speakers, most of them in the Xinjiang province of northwestern China. With the Chinese Communist Party engaged in a campaign to suppress the Uyghur minority and their language (including scrubbing Uyghur websites based in China from the Web), a WeChat group of academics, translators, and other professionals called “Tilchilar” (Uyghur for “linguists”) is doing crucial work to document the language and make sure its vocabulary covers contemporary life without too many loan words from Mandarin. – Global Voices
