The Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet ( ug, ئۇيغۇر كىرىل يېزىقى, or , ) is a

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...

-derived

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 ...

used for writing the

Uyghur language The Uyghur or Uighur language (; , , , or , , , , CTA: Uyğurçä; formerly known as Eastern Turki), is a Turkic language written in a Uyghur Perso-Arabic script with 8-11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xi ...

, primarily by

Uyghurs The Uyghurs; ; ; ; zh, s=, t=, p=Wéiwú'ěr, IPA: ( ), alternatively spelled Uighurs, Uygurs or Uigurs, are a Turkic peoples, Turkic ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central Asia, Cent ...

living in

Kazakhstan Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...

and former CIS countries. It was devised around 1937 by the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

, which wanted an alternative to the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

-derived alphabet they had devised some eleven years earlier, in 1926, as they feared a

romanization Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, a ...

of the Uyghur language would strengthen the relationship of the Uyghurs to

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 ...

, which had switched to a Latin-based alphabet in 1927–1928. After the proclamation of the Communist

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

in 1949, Russian

linguists Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingui ...

began helping the Chinese with codifying the various minority

languages of China There are several hundred languages in China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on central Mandarin, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as ''Hanyu'' (, 'Han language'), that are sp ...

and promoting Cyrillic-derived alphabets and thus the Uyghurs of China also came to use the Uyghur Kiril Yëziqi. As the tensions between the Soviet Union and China grew stronger, the Chinese dismissed the Uyghur Kiril Yëziqi and as of 1959, the newly devised Uyghur Yëngi Yëziqi became the new alphabet of use among the Chinese Uyghurs and eventually China restored the Arabic script to write Uyghur till now. Uyghur Kiril Yëziqi continued to be used in the

, however and is today used in Kazakhstan and former CIS countries and is also the alphabet used for writing Standard Soviet Uyghur. The letters in the Uyghur Cyrillic Alphabet are, in order:

References

External links

Uyghur Awazi (The largest Uyghur Cyrillic news publication online)

Xinjiang travel guide (in Uyghur Cyrillic)
{{Cyrillization Uyghur language Cyrillic alphabets Alphabets used by Turkic languages