CORPUS-BASED MODELLING OF SCRIPT VARIATION AND DIGITAL LEXICAL INNOVATION IN MODERN UZBEK: A FUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO NORMATIVE STABILIZATION

Abstract

This article investigates one of the most urgent problems of contemporary Uzbek linguistics: the functional stabilization of the literary norm under conditions of digital communication, script coexistence, rapid lexical borrowing and corpus-based language description. The central argument is that modernization of Uzbek cannot be reduced to orthographic regulation alone, because real linguistic development is now formed at the intersection of education, official communication, digital journalism, social media, machine transliteration, speech technologies and academic terminology. The study proposes a functional model for analysing modern Uzbek through five interrelated dimensions: script variation, lexical innovation, morpho-syntactic regularity, digital-register differentiation and educational codification. The research is based on qualitative synthesis of corpus-linguistic, sociolinguistic and applied-linguistic approaches, with particular attention to the challenges faced by an agglutinative, historically multi-script and comparatively low-resource language in the digital environment. The findings indicate that Latin-Cyrillic coexistence, English-based digital borrowings and inconsistent orthographic habits should not be treated merely as signs of disorder. They constitute empirical material through which linguists can identify actual usage patterns and design more precise lexicographic, educational and technological solutions. The article concludes that the future of Uzbek literary language development depends on evidence-based codification, balanced terminology policy, high-quality annotated corpora and systematic integration of linguistic research with digital humanities and language technologies.