When values live, the nation lives!

Introduction 

Uzbekistan, like a paradise, is a phrase that everyone understands differently. For some, a peaceful and quiet land with a clear sky comes to mind, while for others, warm and delicious bread baked in a tandoor and delicious delicacies are pictured. Just as every country has its own history and future, Uzbekistan has overcome many difficulties to become “Uzbekistan”. Currently, many young people are interested in European culture, pay more attention to foreign languages, and strive to enter Europe. However, we, the youth, must respect European cultures, constantly remember our Uzbek national values, customs, and our ancestors who have amazed the world, and set an example for the whole world. “What are national values?” The question is also often asked.

 Main part

Our national values and traditions are understood as the heritage left by our ancestors, religious beliefs, hospitality, love for language and homeland. In particular, respect for our national values, respect for our native language, and the history of our past should be known to everyone and we should all be proud of it. We should proudly present our national clothes, including atlases, adras and Uzbek skullcaps, to the whole world. My dear President Sh.M. Miromonovich declared every Friday in our country as “National Clothing” Day in order to prevent our national values from disappearing and developing. We have set an example for young people and are celebrating this day with pride, appreciating our national clothes and making them feel our national values.

 Conclusion

We, the youth, will further elevate our New Uzbekistan with our own thinking and potential, taking our national values as an example, taking our ancestors Amir Temur, Al-Bukhari, Al-Khwarizmi, and Al-Farghani as an example. Today’s youth are the successors and promoters of our national values. If every young man and woman deeply studies these values and applies them in society, spiritual upliftment will be ensured in society.

Dilnura Khahhorova was born in 2011. She is currently an 8th grade student at school No. 338 in the Mirzo Ulugbek district of Tashkent city. Due to her interest in her native language and literature, she has won honorable places and major prizes in many creative works at the school and district levels. At the same time, she has her place in every competition and event held at the school. Her creative work is published in the book “Ilhom tomchilari”.

Firelight

The firelight warmed our toes

on a frosty night.

Fall had arrived.

There was a chill in the air.

We toasted our glasses

as a cold front hit.

Rain wrapped Tornado

A rain wrapped tornado

swirls around high in the sky.

Dark clouds

hover overhead.

Taking shelter,

we are spared from the storm.

Mary Bone has been writing poetry and short stories since childhood. Some of her poems have appeared in Synchronized Chaos, Poetry Catalog, Literary Revelations, Active Muse Journal, Blaze Vox Spring Journal of Voice and other places. Upcoming poetry has been accepted at Feed the Holy and Our Poetry Archive.

Rhian Elizabeth’s maybe i’ll call gillian anderson speaks to the liminal spaces we experience as we transition from one role to another in our relationships. 

The book begins with the titular piece where a lonely mom says goodbye to a daughter moving away to college. Next, the same narrator has an elaborate dream of befriending an elderly stranger who comforts her after the loss of her own grandmother and father (drowning on a stranger’s couch). Other pieces depict a mom who feels needed again while caring for a drunken teenager (a new and precarious thing) and a still-grieving queer woman who remembers how in an ill-fated relationship, her lover’s snoring sounded too much like her deceased grandmother’s tea kettle (to the girl who said i’ll never be happy because i’m too picky).

Grief becomes a motif in this collection, which includes pieces referencing the losses of the narrator’s father, grandmother, and past lovers. Sometimes the losses are the focus of the poems, other times they’re mentioned as asides adding depth to a piece on another topic. The daughter’s move towards adulthood becomes a catalyst for the narrator to take stock of her life and consider how she will navigate 40 years of grief and self-discovery. 

The prose is all lower case with contractions and some punctuation shorthands (the & sign) giving the book a familiar feeling, like reading the narrator’s Instagram posts. In keeping with this, she includes tidbits of unglamorous daily life: killing spiders, vomiting, drinking soda for breakfast. 

She also speaks openly of trauma from verbal abuse at work (glasgow) and sexual abuse from a creepy older man (the photograph & the man who took it). And, of her own awkward past, complete with mornings hung over with strange women in her bed (i drank too much and woke up in sweden next to a blonde) and a relationship that made her feel like a trapped lobster in a cage (lobster). 

Dreams and dream-states serve as another motif in this collection. Characters have actual dreams, sleepwalk, get lost and knock on the wrong doors, have lengthy waking reveries, and drive through fog. Being halfway between waking and sleeping echoes the liminal spaces in which the narrator finds herself and also the dislocation of grief and of major life transitions. 

In the end, the book comes full circle, checking in with the lonely mother whose daughter left home (i didn’t call gillian anderson). Remembering that she “learned a long time ago that beautiful women aren’t the solution to [her] problems and because, you know, [she doesn’t] have her fucking phone number,” she decides against calling actress Gillian Anderson. Instead, she finds her confidence and her center, meditating, going back to school, reconnecting with friends, and nervously wishing her daughter all the best. 

Rhian Elizabeth’s maybe i’ll call gillian anderson is available here from Broken Sleep Press. 

The Virtue of Crowds

Left alone I would

run out of excuses.

It’s a by-product of

staying too long in

the one place. That’s

the virtue of crowds.

Swept along with no

idea of where I’m go-

ing, not really caring,

too busy sharing other

people’s destinations.

So pick any arbitrary

point to turn even if

still surrounded.

Finally apologizing

if really necessary.

The First Position

Caught by an aberration

in the parameters of the

Library he paused. Stopped

for a moment by a book-

case. Noticed that the titles

were different, were now

written in a language that

was foreign to him. Became

perplexed. Uncertain if it was

a diminuition of his psyche or

simply his eyes playing tricks.

smalltown weekend

The shopping center is

Sunday empty. A State

regulation — remember the

sabbath or some such re-

fried beans. Only the bakery

& the newsagent open. Bread

rolls & Lotto, one certain

one wishful.  But I’m a

believer in musical omens,

so the fact that the left-on-

all-the-time soundsystem is

piping country music into

the passageways as I enter

signs no luck for me today.

Seasonal

Broad brushstrokes

of smoke across

the landscape. Point-

illist pain in my

head, just behind

the ear. Everything

closes in, is

focused. Nothing

I can do but

cut myself another

slice of watermelon,

lie back, &

think of England.

The Dichotomous Key

If it has these attributes

then it is this.  

Otherwise it is not this.

& if it is not this, but has

these other attributes

then it is that.  

Otherwise it is not that.

If it is neither this nor

that, but possesses another

set of characteristics

then…..

& so on

down the line, eliminating

the alternatives by

counting in turn the

wings, legs, body

segments, etc.

so that you

might start off

with the spider

& end up

with the fly.

Ode To An Orgone Instructor At Mute Noon

Her hair braids in the hallucinatory hour, 

through night’s numinous negativa, 

the nocturne of Novalis’ flower. Her syllabus

is papyri in a second skin rising in coptic 

numbers in her slumber. There is a new form 

in her stanzaic hair toss, tones of lexical marigold, 

of holofoilhydrangea? Hair a sensory brushfire? 

Amen, announce the birdcall 

of her oratory. In torn patches 

of evening light, she is interpreter

to Plato’s star, scrunchie sewn 

to the circadian coordinates 

of her compact sound mirror. 

Orgone instructor at mute noon,

her mind on the pitching mound, 

baseball’s borderlands her first life. 

in the outfield’s scattered glory,

sky spattered like a fresh Pollock, 

blown like his sifting static sands

in i grovigli dell’anima. Amen, announce 

her birdcall in kairos, white jacket, her 

second skin read casually. I know that here 

is Woman made manifest, marigold 

maeanad, incorporeal; face blazed 

on a C-note, sinking in a sleepy jukebox.

her lucid lyric one of sight through 

one shock’s refractory tempest. 

John Thomas Allen is a 41 year old poet who is interested in experimental poems and particularly speculative ficton and poetry.  He lives in Upstate NY, and writes almost every day. Some things he sits back and laughs at.

Bilingualism and Cognitive Development in Children: A Study of Uzbek-Russian Bilinguals

Abstract: This paper investigates how bilingualism—especially Uzbek-Russian bilingualism—affects cognitive development in youngsters. Emphasizing the cognitive benefits seen in bilingual children—especially in executive functioning, memory control, metalinguistic awareness, and socio-cognitive development—it draws from present research and data gathered in Uzbekistan.

Although the advantages are clear, the article also addresses contextual issues such linguistic dominance and social attitudes. The paper underlines the need to encourage bilingual education in

multilingual cultures and urges greater study on underrepresented bilingual communities including Uzbek-Russian children.

Keywords: Bilingualism, cognitive development, executive functions, Uzbek Russian, metalinguistic awareness, theory of mind, socio-cognitive skills, Uzbekistan, language development, children.

Introduction

For decades, psychologists, linguists, and educators have been fascinated by bilingualism. Although the worldwide body of study has usually concentrated on European or North American populations, little is known about multilingual children in Central Asia, particularly in Uzbekistan.

Given the country’s multilingual background—where Uzbek is the state language and Russian is still widely spoken— children are often reared in bilingual settings. Focusing on executive processes, working memory, theory of mind, and metalinguistic awareness, this study looks at how Uzbek-Russian multilingual influences cognitive development.

The sociolinguistic scene of Uzbekistan provides a special background for research on bilingualism. Historically influenced by Soviet policy, Russian has retained a prominent presence in education, media, and government. Despite efforts to promote Uzbek, many families continue to speak both languages at home or across generations (Abduraxmanova & Abdurayimova, 2024).

Bilingual children often get instruction in Uzbek while consuming Russian media, leading to high levels of functional bilingualism. Recent research indicates that bilingualism improves various facets of cognitive growth. Constant mental switching between languages, Bialystok (2001) claims, helps bilingual children acquire better executive functions.

These consist of improved attentional management, mental flexibility, and inhibitory control. Baart et al. (2024) discovered in a comparative research that Uzbek-Russian bilingual kids did better in audiovisual speech perception activities than their monolingual counterparts.

Bilinguals also seem to have better memory performance. Kids with two language systems grow more efficient working memory to organize and keep vocabulary and grammar from both languages (Practice in Clinical Psychology, 2024).

This backs a developing agreement that bilingualism challenges and strengthens children’s cognitive control mechanisms rather than confounding them. Often, bilingual kids have improved metalinguistic awareness—the capacity to understand the structure and application of language.

This capacity becomes especially clear in Uzbekistan, where youngsters negotiate between two grammatically distinct languages (Alimova, 2023). They learn to think about language not simply as a medium of communication but as a system of rules that might fluctuate.

Theory of mind, the understanding that others have views and viewpoints different from one’s own, is also improved in multilingual children (Kyuchukov et al., 2023).Among Uzbek Lyuli youngsters, who speak both Uzbek and Russian or Tajik, bilingualism was found to boost early development of perspective-taking and empathy.

Despite these advantages, bilingual youngsters in Uzbekistan confront problems. Some families regard Russian to be the “prestige language,” resulting to unequal development or even loss of Uzbek abilities among urban youth. Tursunova et al. (2023) caution that such changes could impair cultural identity and weaken native language ability.

Moreover, educational systems generally do not fully support balanced bilingual development. Lack of skilled teachers, inadequate bilingual materials, and cultural bias against minority languages lead to language dominance and code-switching anxiety (Miliyeva, 2023).

Recent study in locations like Tashkent and Bukhara demonstrates that multilingual youngsters often develop early literacy skills in both languages and exhibit excellent social adaptation. However, language use varies largely on parental influence, school language policy, and peer group preferences (Baart et al., 2024; Tursunova et al., 2023). For instance, in houses where both languages are equally supported, children demonstrate higher vocabulary retention and comprehension.

Uzbek-Russian bilingualism is a good case study for learning how managing two languages influences a child’s cognitive development. The benefits—ranging from higher executive functioning to better social understanding—are consistent with global research on bilingualism. However, to reap these benefits, educational policy in Uzbekistan should better foster balanced bilingualism and overcome cultural biases.

Future research should include longitudinal data and neurocognitive tests to better validate these findings in Central Asia.

References

1. Abduraxmanova, X. R., & Abdurayimova, A. I. (2024). Reflection of Uzbek-Russian bilingualism in the speech of residents of Uzbekistan. European International Journal of Pedagogics, 4(5), 61–63.

https://eipublication.com/index.php/eijp/article/view/1873

2. Alimova, M. I. (2023). The impacts of bilingualism on children’s language development. American Journal of Pedagogical and Educational Research, 12, 300–302. https://www.americanjournal.org/index.php/ajper/article/view/924

3. Baart, M., Arakelian, E., Morozov, A., & Usmanova, M. (2024). Exploring audiovisual speech perception in monolingual and bilingual children in Uzbekistan. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 239, 105808.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105808

4. Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. Cambridge University Press.

5. Konnikova, M. (2013, January 22). Is bilingualism really an advantage? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/bilingual-advantage-aging-brain

6. Kyuchukov, H., de Villiers, J., Mamurov, B. B., & Akramova, G. R. (2023). Narratives reflecting Theory of Mind among bilingual Lyuli children of Uzbekistan. Journal of Language and Cultural Education, 11(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.2478/jolace-2023-0001

7. Miliyeva, M. G. (2023). Influence of bilingualism on socio-cognitive personal development. Zien Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1(4). https://zienjournals.com/index.php/zjssh/article/view/37658. Practice in Clinical Psychology. (2024). Cognitive abilities in monolingual and bilingual children: A comparative study in Azerbaijan Iran. Practice in Clinical Psychology, 12(3). https://jpcp.uswr.ac.ir/article-1-930-en.html

9. Tursunova, Z. F., Mamatova, D., & Sharipov, M. (2023). Bukhara’s linguistic mosaic: Unraveling bilingual dynamics. Comparative Linguistics, Translation, and Literary Studies, 1(2). https://citrus.buxdu.uz

An Ordinary Saturday Night

Four beers in

On an ordinary Saturday night

And he’s doing internet research

On why dogs

Sit on people’s chests,

He can’t believe that his London

Has been gone

For more than two years.

Taylor Dibbert is a poet in Washington, DC. He’s author of, most recently, “Takoma.”