Karakalpaks

About Karakalpaks-

• The name Karakalpakstan is derived from the Karakalpak people, an ethnic minority group of around 2 million. 
• Karakalpakstan, which constitutes approximately 40 percent of Uzbekistani territory, is an ethnically diverse region populated largely by ethnic minorities – Karakalpaks and Kazakhs, who share a lot of cultural and linguistic similarities.
• Karakalpak translates to ‘black hat’, referring to their traditional headgear.
• They consider themselves to be a distinct cultural group in Uzbekistan. 
• Their Turkic language – Karakalpak – is closely related to Kazak and is one of the 7 languages of instruction in Uzbekistan’s public schools. 
• In their genealogical narrative, the Karakalpaks claim to share a common point of origin with the neighbouring Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Turkmen, but believe that over time they diverged from the others. 
• The Karakalpak people settled around the Amu Darya (a river that feeds into the Aral Sea) in the 18th century. 
• By 1873, they partly came under Russian rule and by 1920 were completely incorporated into the Soviet Union.
• Their region, Karakalpakstan, was an autonomous area within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russia during 1917-1922), before it was made a part of Uzbekistan as the Karakalpak Autonomous Socialist Republic (ASSR) in 1936.

• When Uzbekistan declared its independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991, Karakalpak ASSR was re-established as the Republic of Karakalpakstan in December of the same year. 
• Karakalpakstan was formally recognized as an autonomous republic in Uzbekistan’s constitution of 1992, and has the right to secede from on the basis of a nation-wide referendum.