Gustaf Ahlbert (26 January 1884 – 1943) was a Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 missionary and linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

. He served with the Mission Union of Sweden in Chinese Turkestan

Xinjiang

Xinjiang is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It is the largest Chinese administrative division and spans over 1.6 million km2...

 (present day Xinjiang).

Ahlbert had a competent knowledge of Hebrew, Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, Arabic and Uyghur

Uyghur language

Uyghur , formerly known as Eastern Turk, is a Turkic language with 8 to 11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Significant communities of Uyghur-speakers are located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and various other...

.

He was one of the last three missionaries to be expelled from Kashgar

Kashgar

Kashgar or Kashi is an oasis city with approximately 350,000 residents in the western part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. Kashgar is the administrative centre of Kashgar Prefecture which has an area of 162,000 km² and a population of approximately...

 in 1939. After he was expelled, he worked among Muslims in India, and worked together with Oskar Hermansson and Dr. Nur Luke

Dr. Nur Luke

Dr. Nur Luke was an Uyghur Bible translator from Hotan. He fled Xinjiang in the 1930s, and together with Gustaf Ahlbert, and Oskar Hermannson finished the translation of the Uyghur Bible in India. This was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1946.-External links:*...

 on the Uyghur Bible translation, until his death in Bombay in 1943.

See also

• Mission and Change in Eastern Turkestan (English Translation of select chapters of Mission och revolution i Centralasien)