Zahiriddin Muhammad Babur’s Skill In Word Usage: The Arabic Lexical Layer In His Works

Abstract

This article examines the Arabic lexical layer (Arabisms) in the Accepted: 28-05-2026 works of Zahiriddin Muhammad Babur and the poet’s skill in employing it. Published:09-06-2026 Drawing on examples from the Baburnama, it analyzes how Arabic loanwords entered Old Uzbek through religious, ethical, Sufi, and scholarly registers, and how the morphological differences between Arabic (an inflectional language) and Uzbek (an agglutinative language) shaped their adaptation. The Arabic root- and-pattern (wazn) system, orthographic adaptation, the categories of rational Copyright: © 2026 by the authors. and irrational nouns, sound and broken plurals, and verbal nouns (masdars) Submitted for open access publication are illustrated with material from Babur’s lexicon. under the terms and conditions of the