Tatar Alphabet

Tatar (татар теле) has been written in Cyrillic since 1939. For centuries before that it was written in Arabic script, and from 1928 to 1939 in a Latin alphabet called Yañalif. The Cyrillic alphabet has 39 letters, six of them for Tatar's own sounds: Ә, Җ, Ң, Ө, Ү and Һ.

In Tatar alphabetical order the letters are: А Ә Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж Җ З И Й К Л М Н Ң О Ө П Р С Т У Ү Ф Х Һ Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я. Each special letter follows the letter it is built on, so Ә comes straight after А, Җ after Ж, Ң after Н, Ө after О, Ү after У and Һ after Х. (Bashkir, the closest relative, puts its Ә near the end instead.)

Ё, Ц and Щ belong mainly to words borrowed from Russian, while native Tatar words lean on the six special letters. Tatar punctuation uses guillemets « » for quotations, „ “ for quotes inside quotes, a long dash — for dialogue, and № before numbers.

The six Tatar letters and their sounds

Ә ә is the open front vowel of English "cat" and one of the most frequent letters in Tatar: әни (mother), әти (father), сәлам (hi), рәхмәт (thank you). Ө ө and Ү ү are rounded front vowels, close to German ö and ü: өй (house), өч (three), көн (day), күл (lake), үз (self). They matter because Tatar has vowel harmony: suffixes change their vowels to match the word, so a front-vowel word takes front-vowel endings.

Җ җ is a voiced sound close to the j of English "jam", softer than Russian ж: җыр (song), җир (earth, land), җомга (Friday), and the poet Муса Җәлил. Ң ң is the ng of English "sing": таң (dawn), яңа (new), миңа (to me). Һ һ is a plain h and appears mostly in words of Arabic and Persian origin: һәм (and), һава (air, weather), шәһәр (city).

Some Tatar sounds have no letter of their own. Before back vowels, к and г are said deeper in the throat, close to q and a throaty gh, as in кыз (girl) and кар (snow). In native words в and у after a vowel often sound like English w, as in авыл (village) and тау (mountain). Kazakh and Bashkir write the throaty sounds with separate letters (Қ, Ғ, Ҡ); Tatar Cyrillic does not.

How to type Tatar letters on a keyboard

Windows includes a Tatar keyboard layout: add it under Settings › Time & language › Language & region by adding the Tatar language. It keeps the Russian arrangement and adds the six Tatar letters. Linux offers a Tatar variant of the Russian layout in its keyboard settings. On a phone, choose Tatar in a keyboard app such as Gboard, or copy the letters from this page.

Without a Tatar layout, Microsoft Word types any letter from its code followed by Alt+X: 04D9 ә, 0497 җ, 04A3 ң, 04E9 ө, 04AF ү, 04BB һ (for capitals: 04D8 Ә, 0496 Җ, 04A2 Ң, 04E8 Ө, 04AE Ү, 04BA Һ). On a Mac, the Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space) finds them by name, such as "schwa" or "zhe with descender". In HTML, write ә for ә, җ for җ, ң for ң, ө for ө, ү for ү, һ for һ.

Watch the look-alikes, because search, spell-checking and sorting treat them as different characters: Tatar uses Cyrillic Ә, not Latin Ə; Cyrillic Ө, not Latin Ɵ or Greek Θ; Cyrillic Ү and Һ, not Latin Y and h; and the single letter Җ, not Ж followed by a comma or a combining mark. Text typed on a keyboard without these letters sometimes uses such stand-ins, so it is worth replacing them.

Tatar in Latin letters

Tatar has a living Latin spelling too. In 1999 Tatarstan passed a law to move Tatar to a Latin alphabet (known as Zamanälif, with letters such as Ä, Ö, Ü, Ç, Ş, Ñ, Ğ and Q), but a 2002 Russian federal law requires the state languages of Russia's republics to be written in Cyrillic, so Cyrillic remains the official script. The Latin spelling is still used by some writers online and by Tatars abroad, which is why people also search for the Tatar Latin alphabet and Cyrillic-to-Latin converters.

Do not confuse Tatar with Crimean Tatar, a separate Turkic language of Crimea that is mostly written in Latin letters today; the two share a name and some vocabulary but are not the same language.

Where Tatar is spoken

Tatar is an official language of the Republic of Tatarstan, alongside Russian, with its capital Kazan (Казан) on the Volga. Tatar communities also live in Bashkortostan, the wider Volga and Ural regions, Moscow and Siberia, and abroad in Central Asia, Turkey and Finland. Unicode's CLDR estimates about 2 million speakers in Russia; other counts, including Russian censuses, give higher figures. Amounts are written in rubles, with the sign ₽.

Tatar is a Kipchak Turkic language, very close to Bashkir, whose speakers largely understand it, and related to Kazakh, Kyrgyz and, more distantly, Uzbek and Turkish. Chuvash, also spoken on the Volga, is Turkic too but from a separate branch. For their alphabets see the Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Chuvash, Uzbek, Turkish and Russian collections; for 🇷🇺 and the country's emoji see Russia.