Both scripts exist in Uzbek’s recent history, which is exactly why the question comes up. Here is the official answer, and the practical one.
Key points
- Latin is Uzbek’s official script in Uzbekistan; the switch has been underway since the 1990s.
- State institutions were required to use Latin from 1 January 2023.
- Cyrillic is still common in practice, especially among older people and in older print.
- In Afghanistan, Uzbek is traditionally written in a Perso-Arabic script instead.
The official answer: Latin
Uzbekistan’s parliament approved the first post-independence Latin-script law in September 1993, revising it in May 1995 to settle details like the digraphs sh, ch, ng and the letters oʻ and gʻ. Since then, Latin has been the country’s official script for Uzbek. The most consequential recent deadline came into force on 1 January 2023, when the Justice Ministry required all organisations to draft and publish their paperwork in Uzbek using Latin script, following a 2021 roadmap that had already moved ID documents to Latin in 2022. Even the presidential administration’s own communications, previously mixed between the two scripts, switched fully to Latin in October 2025. The full alphabet, all 29 letters with pronunciation, is on this site.
The practical answer: Cyrillic hasn’t disappeared
Legal deadlines and everyday habits are two different things. Cyrillic remains genuinely common: on older signs, in some newspapers, in older books and educational material, and in the daily writing of people who learned to read and write before the reform took hold. Reporting as recent as mid-2026 has noted that, despite the passed deadlines, Cyrillic remains firmly present in parts of bureaucracy, media and daily life. For a learner, that means Latin is what to learn, but Cyrillic is not something you can assume you’ll never see.
Cyrillic and older material
This split script history is exactly why so much older or free Uzbek learning material is in Cyrillic. The best-known free course, a Peace Corps manual dated July 1992, predates the Latin reform entirely and teaches Cyrillic; see our grammar PDF guide for what is actually free and legitimate to download. Some current textbooks, including a well-known university one, include a Cyrillic reader as an appendix for exactly this reason: it is a skill worth having in reserve, not the skill to start with.
Outside Uzbekistan: a third script
Uzbek is not written the same way everywhere it is spoken. In Afghanistan, where a substantial Uzbek-speaking population lives, Uzbek is traditionally written using a Perso-Arabic-based script, reflecting Afghanistan’s dominant writing tradition rather than either of the two scripts used in Uzbekistan. If you are learning Uzbek specifically to communicate with Afghan Uzbek speakers, that is worth knowing going in, though the spoken language itself is closely related.
Which one to learn
Learn to read and write Latin. It is the current official script, the one on new documents, signage and most modern learning material, and the one Uzbekcha and this site teach. Treat Cyrillic as a recognition skill for later: enough to make sense of an older sign or an inherited book, not something to write yourself.
Where Uzbekcha fits
Uzbekcha is an AI tutor for Uzbek, made in Tashkent, not available yet beyond the waitlist. It teaches the Latin script exclusively and shows the Cyrillic form only where a learner is realistically likely to meet it, such as on older signs.