Uyghur alphabets


is a Turkic language with a long literary tradition spoken in Xinjiang, China by the Uyghurs. Today, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet is the official writing system used for Uyghur in Xinjiang. Whereas other alphabets like the Uyghur Latin alphabet and Uyghur Cyrillic alphabets are still in use outside China, especially Central Asia.

History

Old Uyghur and Modern Uyghur

The Old Uyghur language and Modern Uyghur are distinct Turkic languages and are not different stages of the same language. The Old Uyghur language is ancestral to Western Yugur, while modern Uyghur is descended from one of the Karluk languages.

Old Uyghur alphabets

5th to 18th century

In the 5th century Old Uyghur was written for the first time using the Sogdian alphabet. This fell out of use during the 10th century, when it evolved into the Old Uyghur alphabet, although it was taken into use again between the 15th and 16th century. While the Sogdian alphabet was still in use, it was written with the Old Turkic alphabet from the 6th-9th centuries.
The Old Uyghur language evolved into the modern Western Yugur, and remained in use until the 18th century among the Yugur.

Modern Uyghur alphabets

10th century to 19th century

An Arabic alphabet introduced along with Islam in the 10th century to the Karluk Kara Khanids, which evolved into the modern day Uyghur Arabic alphabet.
The Arabic-derived alphabet taken into use first came to be the so-called Chagatai script, which was used for writing the Chagatai language and the Turki language, but fell out of use in the early 1920s, when the Uyghur-speaking areas variously became a part of, or under the influence of, the Soviet Union.
The Chagatai alphabet was known as Ⱪona Yeziⱪ .
The Syriac alphabet has also been used for writing Old Uyghur at some time between the 5th century and 19th century.

20th to 21st century

The writing of Uyghur saw many changes during the 20th century mostly to do with political decisions, both from the Soviet and Chinese side. The Soviet Union first tried to romanize the writing of the language, but soon after decided to promote a Cyrillic script during the late 1920s known as the Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet, fearing that a romanization of the language would strengthen the relationship of the Uyghurs with other Turkic peoples.
With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the promotion of a Cyrillic script began, but when the tensions between the Soviet Union and China grew during the late 1950s, the Chinese devised a new alphabet based upon Pinyin and Cyrillic, which is known as the Uyghur New Script and promoted this instead, and which soon became the official alphabet of usage for almost 10 years.
In 1982 Uyghur new script was abolished, the Arabic alphabet was reinstated in a modified form as the Uyghur Arabic alphabet. However, due to the increasing importance of information technology, there have been requests for a Latin alphabet, for easier use on computers. This resulted in five conferences between 2000 and 2001, where a Latin-derived auxiliary alphabet was devised known as the Uyghur Latin alphabet.

Present situation

Today, the Uyghur language is written using four different alphabets, which are:
In the table below, the alphabets are shown side-by-side for comparison, together with phonetic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is only grouped by phonemic proximity; each alphabet has its own sorting order. Some letter forms that are used for words borrowed from other languages, or kept occasionally from older orthographic conventions, are shown in parentheses.
As it can be seen, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet, Uyghur New Script and Uyghur Latin alphabet each have a total of 32 letters. Differences may still exist in texts using the newer Latin orthography, where the standard choice of is sometimes written instead, with the acute accent instead of the standardized diaeresis: this should not make any difference in Uyghur.
The Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet has three additional letters, the Cyrillic soft letters/ligatures,, and, representing,, and, respectively, which are written with an independent consonant and vowel in the other alphabets. Some words may still use the Cyrillic soft sign. Also, loanwords of Russian origin are often spelled as they are in Russian, and thus not adapted to Uyghur orthography.
Another notable feature of the Uyghur New Script is the use of the letter to represent . This letter has erroneously been named LATIN LETTER OI in Unicode, although it is correctly referred to as gha and replaced by the digraph in the newer Uyghur Latin alphabet.
In the Uyghur Latin alphabet, only the ISO basic Latin alphabet is needed, with the common diaeresis being the only diacritic added above vowels, which is also supported by many fonts and encoding standards. The letter is only used in the digraph, and the letter is normally not used, except in loanwords where the difference between and is needed for correct pronunciation and distinctions. The may be interchangeably represented in two ways, either as or as, although the latter is also used for . In the Arabic and Cyrillic orthographies, the distinction of is only seen as a graphic variant of, reducing the Latin alphabet to only 31 effective letters. This variation is due to several opposing arguments, and therefore it was accepted that both are acceptable, as long as no semantic distinction is necessary.
One of the major differences among the four alphabets is the rules of when the glottal stop is written. In Uyghur Arabic alphabet, it is consistently written, using the hamza on a tooth, as well as at the beginning of words. However, in that case, that Arabic letter is not considered as a separate letter in Uyghur, but as the holder of the Arabic vowel that follows, without pronouncing the glottal stop itself, but only a hiatus. However, some words of Arabic origin won't always be using this tool.
In the Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet and Uyghur New Script, the glottal stop was only written word-medially, using an apostrophe, but it is not required and thus not very consistent.
And finally, in the Uyghur Latin alphabet, the glottal stop is written between consonants and vowels, and also to separate,,, and when these represent two phonemes and not digraphs for single consonants; for instance, the word bashlan’ghuch, pronounced and meaning beginning, which would have been pronounced without the apostrophe.

Example

Below is the same text in Uyghur, but written using each of the four alphabets in common use today.
The text is taken from the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

General

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