VERBAL AND CULTURAL CODES IN SELECTED UZBEK FOLK RITUALS A Linguocultural Analysis of Sust Xotin, Choymomo, Kelin Salom, and Chilla

Abstract

This article examines how selected Uzbek folk rituals use verbal forms to organize relationships among participants, natural forces, material objects, and socially significant transitions. The study focuses on four ritual complexes: the rain-making ceremony Sust Xotin, the wind-stopping ceremony Choymomo, the wedding greeting Kelin Salom, and the forty-day transitional period known as Chilla. Rather than claiming an exhaustive corpus or new ethnographic fieldwork, the research undertakes a qualitative reanalysis of ritual texts and descriptions reported in published Uzbek folklore scholarship and heritage documentation. The analytical framework combines lexical-semantic analysis, morphosyntactic description, conceptual metaphor, and speech-act-oriented pragmatics. The findings indicate four recurrent tendencies within the selected material: the personification of natural forces through kinship vocabulary; the use of imperative, optative, and hortative forms to express culturally intended action; the association of colour and household vocabulary with purity, protection, and social order; and the use of taboo avoidance and euphemistic naming during periods of perceived vulnerability. These tendencies do not establish a single, uniform Uzbek ritual system, and their historical origins cannot be determined from textual similarity alone. They nevertheless demonstrate how ritual discourse links linguistic form with communal expectations and culturally transmitted models of efficacy. The article concludes by proposing a source-transparent digital corpus of Uzbek ritual language that records regional, textual, and performance variation.