The Common Turkic Alphabet ( tr, Ortak türk alfabesi; az, Ortaq türk əlifbası, اورتاق تورک الیفباسی; tt-Cyrl, Уртак төрки әлифба, translit=Urtaq törki älifba; kk, Ortaq türkı älıpbiı) is a project of a single
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
for all
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic l ...
based on a slightly modernized
Turkish alphabet. The old system was developed in the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
and used in the 1920-1930s; the current system is an alphabet with 34 letters recognised by the
Organization of Turkic States. Its letters are as follows:
* Long forms of vowels are shown with a
Circumflex (in
Turkish):
Â,
Ê,
Î,
Ô,
Û.
History
In connection with the
collapse of the USSR, in the newly formed republics in which the
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic l ...
were the main ones, the ideas of
Pan-Turkism
Pan-Turkism is a political movement that emerged during the 1880s among Turkic intellectuals who lived in the Russian region of Kazan (Tatarstan), Caucasus (modern-day Azerbaijan) and the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey), with its aim bei ...
became popular again, and, as a consequence, so did the movement for the restoration of the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
. In order to unify, and at the initiative of
Turkey
Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula in ...
in November 1991, an international scientific symposium was held in Istanbul on the development of a unified alphabet for the Turkic languages. It was completely based on the
Turkish alphabet, but with the addition of some missing letters: ä, ñ, q, w, x. As a result, the alphabet consisted of 34 letters, 29 of which were taken from Turkish.
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan (, ; az, Azərbaycan ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, , also sometimes officially called the Azerbaijan Republic is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a part of t ...
was the first to adopt this alphabet in December 1991, later
Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan ( or ; tk, Türkmenistan / Түркменистан, ) is a country located in Central Asia, bordered by Kazakhstan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, east and northeast, Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the sout ...
in April 1993 and
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan (, ; uz, Ozbekiston, italic=yes / , ; russian: Узбекистан), officially the Republic of Uzbekistan ( uz, Ozbekiston Respublikasi, italic=yes / ; russian: Республика Узбекистан), is a doubly landlocked co ...
in September 1993. In September 1993, at a regular conference in
Ankara
Ankara ( , ; ), historically known as Ancyra and Angora, is the capital of Turkey. Located in the central part of Anatolia, the city has a population of 5.1 million in its urban center and over 5.7 million in Ankara Province, maki ...
, representatives of
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan (, ; az, Azərbaycan ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, , also sometimes officially called the Azerbaijan Republic is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a part of t ...
,
Turkmenistan
Turkmenistan ( or ; tk, Türkmenistan / Түркменистан, ) is a country located in Central Asia, bordered by Kazakhstan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, east and northeast, Afghanistan to the southeast, Iran to the sout ...
and
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan (, ; uz, Ozbekiston, italic=yes / , ; russian: Узбекистан), officially the Republic of Uzbekistan ( uz, Ozbekiston Respublikasi, italic=yes / ; russian: Республика Узбекистан), is a doubly landlocked co ...
officially announced the transition to the new alphabet.
However, already in 1992, Azerbaijan was reforming
its alphabet and replacing the letter
ä with
ə, taken from old Cyrillic and
Yañalif
Jaꞑalif, Yangalif or Yañalif (Tatar: jaꞑa əlifba/yaña älifba → jaꞑalif/yañalif, , Cyrillic: Яңалиф, "new alphabet") is the first Latin alphabet used during the latinisation in the Soviet Union in the 1930s for the Turkic languag ...
.
In May 1995, the government of Uzbekistan completely abandoned the new
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
in favor of a different one, based only on the standard 26-letter Latin alphabet. The same version is accepted for the
Karakalpak language
Karakalpak is a Turkic language spoken by Karakalpaks in Karakalpakstan. It is divided into two dialects, Northeastern Karakalpak and Southeastern Karakalpak. It developed alongside Uzbek and neighboring Kazakh languages, being markedly influence ...
.
Turkmenistan also introduced its
own alphabet in 1995, which is only partially similar to the general Turkic, but differs from it in a number of letters.
As a result, only
Azerbaijani (1991, with one letter changed in 1992),
Gagauz (1996),
Crimean Tatar (1992, officially since 1997),
Tatar in the
Tatar Wikipedia (since 2013) and some mass media have used the common Turkic alphabet with minor changes (since 1999).
The Tatar Latin script, introduced in September 1999 and canceled in January 2005, used a slightly different set of additional letters (ŋ instead of ñ, ə instead of ä), and the letter ɵ instead of Turkish ö. Since December 24, 2012, the common Turkic alphabet has been officially used as a means of
transliterating the Tatar Cyrillic alphabet.
In 2019, an updated version of the Uzbek Latin alphabet was revealed by the Uzbek government, with five letters being updated; it was proposed to represent the sounds "ts", "sh", "ch", "oʻ" and "gʻ" by the letters "c", "ş", "ç", "ó" and "ǵ", respectively. This reverses a 1995 reform, and brings the orthography closer to that of
Turkish and also of
Turkmen,
Karakalpak,
Kazakh (2018 version) and
Azerbaijani.
In April 2021, a revised version of the Kazakh Latin alphabet was presented, introducing the letters Ä ä (Ə ə), Ö ö (Ө ө), Ü ü (Ү ү), Ğ ğ (Ғ ғ), Ū ū (Ұ ұ), Ñ ñ (Ң ң), and Ş ş (Ш ш). This version will be officially implemented starting 2023.
Grapheme-phoneme correspondences
The orthographies of Turkic languages are largely phonetic, meaning that the pronunciation of a word can usually be determined from its spelling. This rule excludes recent loanwords such as proper names. The letters representing vowel sounds in Turkic dialects are, in alphabetical order, , and , , , , , , .
* Semi-vowels (''Glottal Letters'') are shown with a breve (or caron in Chuvash):
Ă,
Ĕ,
Ĭ,
Ŏ,
Ŭ.
* The phoneme (Latin
Š or
Ť, Arabic
ث, Cyrillic
Ҫ) is only present in the Bashkir language.
* The phoneme (Latin
Ž or
Ď, Arabic
ذ, Cyrillic
Ҙ) is only present in the Bashkir language.
*
Ä is sometimes written as
Ə ə or
Ǝǝ (Latin glyphs).
* The phonemes (
Ț) and (
Ḑ) are represented in the
Lipka Tatars Belarusian Arabic alphabet.
* Some handwritten letters have variant forms. For example:
Č č=
J j,
Ķ ķ=
Ⱪ
The Latin letter K with descender (capital: Ⱪ, minuscule: ⱪ; sometimes falsely rendered as k̡ or ķ) is a Latin letter.
The letter is very easily confused with the Cyrillic letter ''ka'' with descender ( Қ), which is encoded differently in U ...
ⱪ, and
Ḩ ḩ=
Ⱨ ⱨ.
* The Cyrillic
Ѕ,
Љ, and
Њ may be written as
Ӡ,
Ԡ, and
Ԣ respectively.
*
ٯ =
ق (representing ) or
ڨ (representing ).
*
Ṡ (
ص),
Ż (
ظ), and
Ṫ (
ط) are used to represent the front and back variants of the letters S, Z, and T/D respectively. They are commonly found at the beginning of words to indicate all following vowels will be back vowels. If the sounds S, Z, T, or D occur in the middle of a word with exclusively back vowels, they may appear in their "soft" or neutral forms of S (س), Z (ز), T (ت) or D (د). (The letter
Ṫ (
ط) can represent the back vowel variants of T and D). Unlike Turkish, Arabic does not have vowel-dependent placement rules for these letters; they appear wherever emphatic consonants occur and can thus be seen in any part of the word. Some examples include ''Ṡahib, Ṡabun, Huṡuṡ, Ṡabr,'' etc.
Non-Turkic (Cyrillic or Arabic) Letters
*
Ţ (''T-cedilla'', ) is a letter originating as part of the
Romanian alphabet
The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language. It is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from t ...
, used to represent the
Romanian and
Moldovan phoneme , the
voiceless alveolar affricate
A voiceless alveolar affricate is a type of affricate consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (gum line) just behind the teeth. This refers to a class of sounds, not a single sound. There are several ty ...
(like ''ts'' in ''bolts''). It is written as the letter
T with a small
comma below and it has both lower-case and the upper-case variants. It is also a part of the
Gagauz alphabet
The modern Gagauz alphabet is a 31-letter Latin-based alphabet modelled on the Turkish alphabet. Previously, during Soviet rule, Gagauz's official script was Cyrillic.
Gagauz was first written in Greek letters in the late 19th century.M. Ciachi ...
and the
Livonian alphabet. The letter corresponds to Cyrillic Tse (
Ц) in the romanisation of Cyrillic Turkic alphabets.
*
Ḑ (''D-cedilla'', ) is a letter originating as part of the old
Romanian alphabet
The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language. It is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from t ...
, used to represent the old
Romanian and
Moldovan sound , the
voiced alveolar affricate.
[Negruzzi, Constantin, Studii asupra limbei române, in vol. "Alexandru Lăpuşneanul", Ed. Pentru Literatură, Bucharest, 1969.] It is written as the letter
D with a small
comma below, and it has both lower-case and the upper-case variants. It is also a part of the
Livonian alphabet. The letter corresponds to Cyrillic Dze (
Ѕ) in the romanisation of Cyrillic Turkic alphabets.
*
Ḋ (
ض) is only used for Arabic transcriptions; the emphatic consonant it represents does not exist in Turkic languages. For example: ''Ramaḋan, Kaḋı, Kaḋa, Ḋarb, Ḋarbe, Arḋ'', etc.
* The Latin letter
Ë (E-umlaut) has no relation to the Cyrillic letter
Ё (Yo). The Latin letter
Ë represents the sound sequence and thus corresponds to the Cyrillic letter
Є in Ukrainian or
Е in Russian.
* The Cyrillic
Ѕ,
Љ and
Њ all originate in the
Serbian and
Macedonian alphabets and represent the same phonemes as in the CTA.
In the USSR
The New Turkic Alphabet (''Jaꞑalif'', 'Yañalif') was a
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
used by non-
Slavic peoples of the
USSR in the 1920-1930s. The new alphabet utilised the basic Latin letters excluding "w", as well as some additional letters, with a number of them being based on
Cyrillic letterforms. The correspondences between the Soviet Yañalif and modern CTA are given below.
Keyboard layout
The standard Turkish
keyboard layout
A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard.
is the actua ...
for personal computers is as follows:
::
Bibliography
* Heinz F. Wendt: ''Fischer Lexikon Sprachen'', 1961 ()
* Bilal N. Şimşir: Türk Yazi Devrimi, Ankara 1992, S. 119
* Helmut Glück (Hrsg.): ''Metzler Lexikon Sprache'', 2005
. 417()
* Proceedings of the International Symposium of Contemporary Turkish Alphabet (Milletlerarası Çağdaş Türk Alfabeleri Sempozyumu Bildirisi), 1991, İstanbul, M.Ü. Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü, 199
* Zentrum für Türkeistudien, Essen: ''Aktuelle Situation in den Turkrepubliken – Innenpolitik, Sicherheitspolitik, Wirtschaft, Umwelt, Bevölkerung '' (Working Paper 14, 1994)
* FSP Entwicklungssoziologie, Bielefeld: ''Formen der Transvergesellschaftung als gegenläufige Prozesse zur Nationsbildung in Usbekistan'' (Working Paper 334, 2000)
* ''Der Fischer Welt Almanach '94 – Zahlen, Daten, Fakten'', 1993 (S. 846)
* Mehmet Tütüncü: ''Alphabets for the turkic languages''
* Herbert W. Duda: Die neue türkische Lateinschrift. I. Historisches. In: Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 1929, Spalten 441–453. – II. Linguistisches. In: Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 1930, Spalten 399–413.
* F.H. Weißbach: Die türkische Lateinschrift. In: Archiv für Schreib- und Buchwesen 1930, S. 125–138.
* Yakovlev N.F. ''"Development and succeeding problems in Latinizing alphabets"'', No 2, 1936, pp. 25–38 (In Russian
Н.Ф. Революция и письменность* Луначарский. Латинизация русской письменности
* Статья «Новый алфавит» в Литературной энциклопедии
* Nevzat Özkan, Gagavuz Türkçesi Grameri, Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 1996
* Jaŋalif/Яңалиф". Tatar Encyclopedia. (2002). Kazan: Tatarstan Republic Academy of Sciences Institution of the Tatar Encyclopaedia
* Закиев. Тюрко-татарское письмо. История, состояние, перспективы. Москва, "Инсан", 2005
* G.A Gaydarci, E.K Koltsa, L.A.Pokrovskaya B.P.Tukan, Gagauz Türkçesinin Sözlüğü, TC Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları
*Nevzat Özkan, Gagauz Destanları, Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları
* Prof. Dr. Mustafa Argunşah-Âdem Terzi-Abdullah Durkun, Gagauz Türkçesi Araştırmaları Bilgi Şöleni, Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları
*Gagauzum Bucaktır Yerim, Tatura Anamut Ocak Yayınları
* Yakovlev N.F. ''"Development and succeeding problems in Latinizing alphabets"'', "Revolution and script" No 2, 1936, pp. 25–38 (In Russian
* Minglang Zhou (2003). Multilingualism in China: the politics of writing reforms for minority languages, 1949–2002. Volume 89 of Contributions to the sociology of language (illustrated ed.). Published Walter de Gruyter. p. 174. . Retrieved 2011-01-01.
References
{{reflist
External links
Kitabs, the unique highlight of the Belarusian language
See also
*
Latinisation (USSR)
Latinisation or Latinization can refer to:
* Latinisation of names, the practice of rendering a non-Latin name in a Latin style
* Latinisation in the Soviet Union, the campaign in the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s to replace traditional writing s ...
Latin alphabets
Turkic alphabets
1930s in the Soviet Union
Alphabets used by Turkic languages