Chaghatay Curriculum
Ferdowsi Summer School of Persianate Languages and Literatures
July 6 - 31, 2026, Yerevan
The Chaghatay programme (taught by I. Ding) of the Summer School of Persianate Literature has two main goals – to enable the participants with knowledge of Persian and/or Urdu at or above lower-intermediate level to draw on their language skills to read and understand Classical Chaghatay poetry and prose, and to develop an appreciation for the literary tradition understood as ‘Persianate’ shared across communities who speak and/or write in Persian, Turki, and Urdu. Although not the focus of this programme, manuscripts are provided whenever available for practice. The programme also familiarises the participants with different transliteration conventions used in modern editions of Chaghatay texts to facilitate their future research. Additionally, the participants have an opportunity to learn how to convert their Chaghatay reading skills to the study of the two standardised modern reflexes of Chaghatay – Uzbek and Uyghur.
With solid linguistic skills acquired from the course, the participants may look forward to exploring Chaghatay literature beyond the focused literary corpus of this programme as confident independent readers.
Week 1: Preliminaries
Week 1 initiates the participants to the shared characteristics of Turkic languages and grammatical features particular to Chaghatay, comparatively with Persian and Urdu. Nominal morphology will be introduced first, followed by verbal morphology. The participants will be able to parse and understand simple sentences with a glossary by the end of the week.
Session 1.1:
- Introduction to Turkic languages and the literary variety named ‘Chaghatay’
- Introduction to the grammatical characteristics of Turkic: SOV; head-final; the relative stable stem system and morphemes typical of agglutinative languages; verb serialisation; subordination through deverbal nominals instead of subordinate clauses.
- Introduction to the phonology, orthography, and transliteration conventions
- Introduction to nominal morphology
- Stative and dynamic copulas
Session 1.2:
- Nominal morphology: Turkic and Perso-Arabic elements in word formation
- Verbal morphology: finite verbs and simplex inflectional paradigms
Session 1.3:
- Verbal morphology: non-finite verbs and complex inflectional paradigms
- Verbal morphology: derivational morphology
- Verbal morphology: light verb constructions
- Brief history of Chaghatay literature
Week 2: Prose
Week 2 focuses on Chaghatay prose, which shows relatively stable word order, in order to consolidate the grammar acquired in Week I. Extracts from three important prose texts of three genres from Chaghatay literature will be studied: Sayf-i Sarāyī’s 14th-century translation of Saʿdī’s Gulistān, to highlight the importance of classical Persian literature in the Islamic Turcophone world; the literary giant ʿAlī Šēr Navāʾī’s famous treatise on the merits of Turkic as compared with Persian, to enrich the understanding of bilingualism in Islamic Turcophone literary circles; the founder of the Mughal Empire, Ẓāhir al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur’s memoir, to bring to life the important historical figure’s experiences through his own language.
Session 2.1:
- Sayf-i Sarāyī: Gulistān bi-l-Turkī (14th century)
Session 2.2:
- ʿAlī Šēr Navāʾī: Muḥākamat al-Luġatayn (15th century)
Session 2.3:
- Ẓāhir al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur: Bāburnāma (16th century)
Week 3: Poetry: ʿAlī Šēr Navāʾī (1441-1501)
Week 3 progresses to poetry, which shows more non-linear word order. The participants will focus on reading representative poetic works by the most celebrated Chaghatay poet and statesman, ʿAlī Šēr Navāʾī. The participants will learn how the Perso-Arabic ʿarūż system is applied to Chaghatay, and have a chance to listen to musical pieces that contain Navāʾī’s ghazals, as Chaghatay poetry is widely used as lyrics of the maqām traditions among Uzbeks and Uyghurs. The participants will appreciate Navāʾī’s early poetic genius through reading his collection Ġarāʾib al-Ṣiġar, and compare Navāʾī’s own Alexander Romance, Sadd-i Iskandarī, with Niẓāmī’s Iskandarnāma.
Session 3.1:
- The ʿarūż system as applied to Chaghatay
- Navāʾī: two ghazals in song
Session 3.2:
- Navāʾī: Ġarāʾib al-Ṣiġar
Session 3.3:
- Navāʾī: Sadd-i Iskandarī
Week 4: Poetry: Gadās, Šāhs, and Our Days
Week 4 furthers the participants’ knowledge of Chaghatay poetry by introducing the works of two prominent Sufis of the Central Asian Turcophone sphere – Xwāja Aḥmad Yasavī and Bābā Raḥīm Mašrab, who represent the pre-Chaghatay and later Chaghatay periods respectively. Relevant parts of the Uyghur Twelve Muqam repertoire will be provided to accompany the participants’ reading of Mašrab. The poetry of two king-poets, Ḥusayn Bāyqarā and Ẓāhir al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur, will also be studied. The final week of the programme concludes with a short introduction to Uzbek and Uyghur, which are the two standardised modern descendants of Chaghatay, so that the participants may consolidate their Chaghatay knowledge through practical application after the Summer School.
Session 4.1:
– Xwāja Aḥmad Yasavī (1093-1166, pre-Chaghatay)
– Bābā Raḥīm Mašrab (1653-1711, later Chaghatay)
Session 4.2:
– Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (1470-1506)
– Ẓāhir al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (1483-1530)
Session 4.3:
– Introduction to modern Uzbek and Uyghur
ISKANDAR DING holds a BA in Modern Languages and Linguistics from the University of Oxford, an MA in Iranian Studies from SOAS University of London, and has just completed his PhD at SOAS, focusing on diachronic and synchronic topics of Yaghnobi verbal morphosyntax.
Iskandar’s research lies at the intersection of historical linguistics, language contact, and cultural transmission across the eastern Persianate world and adjacent regions.
He has organised Chaghatay reading groups at SOAS where he taught the literary language not only with classical texts, but also reading skills in modern Uzbek and Uyghur
Beyond his academic research, Iskandar engages with broader linguistic and cultural conversations through writing and public scholarship.
