Chagatai Language - Literature

Literature

The most famous of the Chagatai poets is Mir Ali-Shir Nava'i, who among his other works wrote Muhakamat al-Lughatayn, a detailed comparison of the Chagatai and Persian languages, in which he argued for the superiority of the former. His fame is attested by the fact that Chagatai is sometimes called "Nava'i's language". Among prose works, Timur's biography is written in Chagatai Turkic as is also the famous Baburnama (or Tuska Babure) of Babur, the Timurid founding the Mughal Empire.

Important works continued to be written in the Chagatai language into the early twentieth century. Among them are Musa Sayrami's Tārīkh-i amniyya (completed 1903) and its revised version Tārīkh-i ḥamīdi (completed 1908), representing the best sources on the Dungan Rebellion in Xinjiang.

Chagatai literature is still studied in modern Turkey and regarded as part of the Turkish heritage.

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