Reviewed by John A. Erickson, Indiana University

This manual is an important addition to English-language materials on Uzbek. Its two volumes grew out of class materials used in both regular and intensive Uzbek courses at UCLA and aim to provide ‘culturally balanced language materials’ for students who wish, in the authors’s words, to obtain ‘well rounded composition and conversation competence’ in modern literary Uzbek, covering elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels of instruction.

The book contains an introduction; thirty chapters; a bibliography of selected works on Uzbek grammar, dictionaries, modern literature, and other materials on the language; an index of grammatical and other topics covered; and an index of Uzbek morphemes. The introduction provides a succinct overview of modern literary Uzbek, the letters of its Cyrillic alphabet (but not its new Latin alphabet) together with their phonemic correspondents and a description of its phonology.

The chapters are uniformly organized, beginning with a sample proverb and an outline of grammatical topics and exercises covered. This is followed by a short dialogue with its translation and then by sections containing vocabulary (50–100 words); roughly fifteen phrases and idioms; five proverbs; grammar; a brief Uzbek text and its vocabulary; 10–20 Uzbek sentences to be copied and translated into English; about ten sentences in English for translation into Uzbek; ‘Directed composition’, with a topic described in English for students to write about in Uzbek; and ‘Conversation’, with a list of 15–30 expressions for use in conversations on various topics without the context of a dialogue.

The book covers most essential topics in Uzbek grammar, providing detailed descriptions of morphology, with many nominal declensions and verbal conjugations given in table format; however, it does not adequately address many topics in syntax, such as word order, agreement in complex sentences, coordination, subordination, and relative clauses. The vocabulary, phrases and idioms, and proverbs glossed in English at the beginning of each chapter often have no relevance to the readings or exercises that follow. The proverbs are rendered literally and without an illustrative context or explanation.

The conversation sections include topics such as ‘Greetings’, ‘Being thankful’, and ‘Complaints’, as well as ‘Curses’ and ‘Being rude’. Many essential conversation topics are missing, however, such as family, food, cooking, dining, shopping at the bazaar, transportation, and asking for directions, and this absence leaves significant gaps in needed vocabulary, as well as in common examples of certain grammatical constructions (e.g. bare ablative partitive expressions, as in ‘Take some of the bread’, routinely heard while dining). There are also many gaps in what might be expected for certain conversation topics; for example, under ‘Greetings’ one finds expressions such as ‘Hello’, ‘Good-bye’, and ‘How are you?’, but not ‘What is your name?’, ‘Where are you from?’, or their appropriate responses.

In sum, this book could serve as a useful reference manual on Uzbek grammar for both students and instructors, with many exercises that could be incorporated into language courses. Nonetheless, it would clearly need to be supplemented by other language materials to teach students communicative proficiency in many practical topics of conversation.