Uyghur Cyrillic Alphabet

Uyghur has three living scripts. In Xinjiang, China, it is written in a Perso-Arabic alphabet; the Uyghur Latin alphabet (ULY) is used online and in transliteration; and the Uyghurs of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, most of them in Kazakhstan, write it in Cyrillic. The Cyrillic alphabet has 41 letters. Eight of them, Ә, Ғ, Җ, Қ, Ң, Ө, Ү and Һ, write Uyghur sounds, and each sits right after the letter it is built on, so the order runs А Ә Б В Г Ғ Д Е Ё Ж Җ З … Х Һ Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я.

Ә ә is the open e of English "bed", ULY e, as in рәхмәт (rehmet, thank you), while plain Е е is the closer é. Ө ө and Ү ү are the front rounded vowels ö and ü, as in Үрүмчи (Ürümchi). Ғ ғ is a throaty gh made at the back of the mouth, the letter in the people's own name, Уйғур. Қ қ is a k pronounced deep in the throat, ULY q, as in Қәшқәр (Qeshqer, Kashgar). Ң ң is the ng of "sing", Һ һ a plain English h kept apart from Х х, the rough ch of German "Bach", and Җ җ is the j of "jam", as in Ғулҗа (Ghulja).

Two vowel letters do a lot of work: Я я and Ю ю write ya and yu, as in яхши (yaxshi, good). The letters Ё, Ц, Щ, Ъ, Ы, Ь and Э appear mainly in Russian loanwords and names, such as театр and концерт.

Uyghur Cyrillic, Arabic and Latin: letter by letter

Uyghur writing systems have regular sound correspondences, but not every correspondence is one character: ULY uses digraphs such as gh and ng, while Cyrillic Ю and Я map to the sequences yu and ya. In Uyghur Latin terms: А = a, Ә = e, Е = é, И = i, О = o, У = u, Ө = ö, Ү = ü for the eight vowels, and Ғ = gh, Җ = j, Ж = zh, Қ = q, Ң = ng, Х = x, Һ = h, Ч = ch, Ш = sh, В = w, Й = y for the consonants that change shape. So Уйғур becomes Uyghur, рәхмәт becomes rehmet and Қазақстан becomes Qazaqstan.

The traps are look-alikes. Cyrillic В is ULY w, not v; Cyrillic Х is ULY x; Latin j is Cyrillic Җ, while Cyrillic Ж is zh. And Cyrillic Ә (U+04D8) is not the Latin schwa Ə (U+018F) used in Azerbaijani: they look the same, but search and sorting treat them as different letters. The Arabic-script alphabet has its own Uyghur collection.

How to type Uyghur Cyrillic letters

The quickest route is a Kazakh keyboard, which Windows and macOS include and phone keyboards such as Gboard offer: it already has Ә Ғ Қ Ң Ө Ү Һ next to the Russian letters. The one letter it lacks is Җ, which the Tatar layout has, or you can copy it from this page. Kazakh layouts also carry Ұ and І, which Uyghur does not use, so take care not to type them by mistake.

In HTML the extra letters are Ә Ә, ә ә, Ғ Ғ, ғ ғ, Җ Җ, җ җ, Қ Қ, қ қ, Ң Ң, ң ң, Ө Ө, ө ө, Ү Ү, ү ү, Һ Һ and һ һ. The tenge sign ₸ is ₸.

Punctuation and currency in Uyghur Cyrillic

Uyghur Cyrillic print uses guillemets « » for quotations, a long dash — for dialogue, and № before numbers, as in № 5. Curly quotes “ ” are the common alternative on keyboards. The reversed Arabic-script question mark and comma do not carry over: Cyrillic Uyghur uses the ordinary ? and ,.

Uyghurs in Kazakhstan pay in tenge, written with its own sign ₸, as in 500 ₸. In Kyrgyzstan the som now has a sign too, ⃀, added to Unicode in 2021, though many fonts still lack it.

Where Uyghur is written in Cyrillic

CLDR estimates about 400,000 people who use Uyghur in Cyrillic, almost all of them in Kazakhstan, where Uyghurs live mainly in Almaty and the villages of the Almaty region toward the Chinese border. A smaller community in Kyrgyzstan writes the same alphabet. Almaty has a Uyghur-language newspaper, Уйғур авази (Uyghur Awazi), and a Uyghur theatre, and Uyghur is taught in some schools there.

Most Uyghurs, around 7.8 million in CLDR's estimate, live in Xinjiang and write the Arabic script, so Cyrillic and Arabic texts reach different readers of one language. The Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan collections cover those countries, and Cyrillic neighbours with similar extra letters are Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek (Cyrillic), Tatar and Russian.