There exist several alphabets used by Turkic languages, i.e. alphabets used to write Turkic languages:
| Language | Alphabet | Latin | Cyrillic | Perso-Arabic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Altai language (south) | Altai alphabets | Historical | Official | |
| Altai language (north) | Historical | Widely used | ||
| Äynu language | Äynu alphabet | In China | ||
| Azerbaijani language | Azerbaijani alphabet | Official In Azerbaijan | Official In Dagestan (Russia) | Official In Iran |
| Bashkir language | Bashkir alphabet | Historical | Official | Historical |
| Chulym language | Chulym alphabet | In Russia | ||
| Chuvash language | Chuvash alphabet | Official | Historical | |
| Crimean Tatar language | Crimean Tatar alphabet | Official In Ukraine | Official | Historical |
| Dolgan language | Dolgan alphabet | Historical | In Russia | |
| Gagauz language | Gagauz alphabet [a] | Official | Historical | |
| Ili Turki language | Ili Turki alphabet | Mostly unwritten | Mostly unwritten | |
| Karachay-Balkar language | Karachay-Balkar alphabet | Historical | Official | Historical |
| Karaim language | Karaim alphabets [b] | In Lithuania | In Crimea | |
| Karakalpak language | Karakalpak alphabet | Official | Widely used | Historical |
| Kazakh language | Kazakh alphabets | Official In Kazakhstan Transition by 2025 | Widely used | Official In Xinjiang of China |
| Khakas language | Khakas alphabet | Historical | Official | |
| Khalaj language | Khalaj alphabet | In Iran | ||
| Khorasani Turkic | Khorasani Turkic alphabet | In Iran | ||
| Krymchak language | Krymchak alphabet [b] | Historical | In Crimea | |
| Kumyk language | Kumyk alphabet | Historical | Official | Historical |
| Kyrgyz language | Kyrgyz alphabets | Historical, future adoption [1] | Official | In Xinjiang of China |
| Nogai language | Nogai alphabets | Historical | Official | Historical |
| Qashqai language | Qashqai alphabet | In Iran | ||
| Salar language | Salar alphabets [c] | Widely used Pinyin-based alphabet also used | Widely used | |
| Shor language | Shor alphabet | Historical | In Russia | |
| Siberian Tatar language | Siberian Tatar alphabet | Historical | In Russia | |
| Tatar language | Tatar alphabet | Widely used: Zamanälif Historical: Yañalif | Official | Historical: İske imlâ alphabet Yaña imlâ |
| Tofa language | Tofa alphabet | In Russia | ||
| Turkish language | Turkish alphabet [d] | Official | Historical: Ottoman Turkish alphabet | |
| Turkmen language | Turkmen alphabet | Official | Widely used | Historical |
| Tuvan language | Tuvan alphabet | Historical | Official | |
| Urum language | Urum alphabet [a] | Historical | Widely used | |
| Uyghur language | Uyghur alphabets | Still used: Uyghur Latin alphabet Historical: Uyghur Pinyin alphabet | Still used: Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet | Official: Uyghur Arabic alphabet Historical: Chagatai script |
| Uzbek language | Uzbek alphabet | Official in Uzbekistan | Widely used | Official in Afghanistan |
| Western Yugur language | Western Yugur alphabet | In China | ||
| Yakut language | Yakut alphabet | Historical | Official |
^ a: Historically written in Greek script
^ b: Also written in Hebrew script
^ c: Also written in Chinese characters
^ d: Historically, Armenian script is used infrequently
The Old Turkic script was the alphabet used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic khanates from the 8th to 10th centuries to record the Old Turkic language.
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters in predictable ways, such as Greek ⟨α⟩ → ⟨a⟩, Cyrillic ⟨д⟩ → ⟨d⟩, Greek ⟨χ⟩ → the digraph ⟨ch⟩, Armenian ⟨ն⟩ → ⟨n⟩ or Latin ⟨æ⟩ → ⟨ae⟩.
Ö, or ö, is a character that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter "o" modified with an umlaut or diaeresis. Ö, or ö, is a variant of the letter O. In many languages, the letter "ö", or the "o" modified with an umlaut, is used to denote the close- or open-mid front rounded vowels or. In languages without such vowels, the character is known as an "o with diaeresis" and denotes a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified.
The Turkish alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. Mandated in 1928 as part of Atatürk's Reforms, it is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras.
The Old Hungarian script or Hungarian runes is an alphabetic writing system used for writing the Hungarian language. Modern Hungarian is written using the Latin-based Hungarian alphabet. The term "old" refers to the historical priority of the script compared with the Latin-based one. The Old Hungarian script is a child system of the Old Turkic alphabet.
Uyghur or Uighur is a Turkic language written in a Uyghur Perso-Arabic script with 8–13 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Apart from Xinjiang, significant communities of Uyghur speakers are also located in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, and various other countries have Uyghur-speaking expatriate communities. Uyghur is an official language of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; it is widely used in both social and official spheres, as well as in print, television, and radio. Other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang also use Uyghur as a common language.
Uyghur 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 and Uyghur Cyrillic alphabets are still in use outside China, especially in Central Asia.
Old Turkic is the earliest attested form of the Common Turkic languages, first found in Second Turkic Khaganate then in Uyghur Khaganate inscriptions. In marked contrast to Middle Turkic, the geographic extent of (East) Old Turkic is rather confined, being limited mainly to East Turkistan and Mongolia. In terms of the datability of extant written sources, the period of Old Turkic can be dated from slightly before 720 AD to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Orkhon Turkic and Old Uyghur are considered to be dialects of East Old Turkic, Orkhon Turkic being the earliest attested dialect of (East) Old Turkic. There is a difference of opinion among linguists with regard to Karakhanid Turkic, some classify it as another dialect of East Old Turkic, while others prefer to include Karakhanid among Middle Turkic languages; nonetheless, Karakhanid is extremely close to Old Uyghur so much so that a single grammatical description will fit both of them. East Old Turkic and West Old Turkic together comprise the Old Turkic proper. East Old Turkic is the oldest attested member of the Siberian Turkic branch of Turkic languages, and several of its now-archaic grammatical as well as lexical features are extant in the modern Yellow Uyghur, Lop Nur Uyghur and Khalaj ; Khalaj, for instance, has (surprisingly) retained a considerable number of archaic Old Turkic words despite forming a language island within Central Iran and being heavily influenced by Persian. Old Uyghur is not a direct ancestor of the Modern Standard Uyghur language ; the contemporaneous ancestor of Modern Uyghur was one of the Middle Turkic languages, later giving rise to Chagatai literary language.
In a right-to-left, top-to-bottom script, writing starts from the right of the page and continues to the left, proceeding from top to bottom for new lines. Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian are the most widespread RTL writing systems in modern times.
The Kyrgyz alphabets are the alphabets used to write the Kyrgyz language. Kyrgyz uses the following alphabets:
The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy. The Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was altered by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it, and the third-most by number of users.
In Unicode, a script is a collection of letters and other written signs used to represent textual information in one or more writing systems. Some scripts support one and only one writing system and language, for example, Armenian. Other scripts support many different writing systems; for example, the Latin script supports English, French, German, Italian, Vietnamese, Latin itself, and several other languages. Some languages make use of multiple alternate writing systems and thus also use several scripts; for example, in Turkish, the Arabic script was used before the 20th century but transitioned to Latin in the early part of the 20th century. More or less complementary to scripts are symbols and Unicode control characters.
Sergey Yefimovich Malov was a Russian and Soviet Turkologist who made important contributions to the documentation of archaic and contemporary Turkic languages, classification of the Turkic alphabets, and the deciphering of the Turkic Orkhon script.
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the Byzantine theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.
The Old Uyghur alphabet was a Turkic script used for writing the Old Uyghur, a variety of Old Turkic spoken in Turpan and Gansu that is the ancestor of the modern Western Yugur language. The term "Old Uyghur" used for this alphabet is misleading because Qocho, the Uyghur (Yugur) kingdom created in 843, originally used the Old Turkic alphabet. The Uyghur adopted this "Old Uyghur" script from local inhabitants when they migrated into Turfan after 840. It was an adaptation of the Aramaic alphabet used for texts with Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian content for 700–800 years in Turpan. The last known manuscripts are dated to the 18th century. This was the prototype for the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets. The Old Uyghur alphabet was brought to Mongolia by Tata-tonga.
The Uyghur New Script is a Latin alphabet with both Uniform Turkic Alphabet and Pinyin influence, used for writing the Uyghur language between 1965 and 1982, primarily by Uyghurs living in China.
Karakhanid, also known as Khaqani Turkic, was a historical Turkic language developed in the 11th century during the Middle Turkic period under the Kara-Khanid Khanate. It has been described as the first literary Islamic Turkic language. It is sometimes classified under the Old Turkic category, rather than Middle Turkic, as it is contemporary to the East Old Turkic languages of Orkhon and Old Uyghur. Eastern Middle Turkic languages, namely Khorezmian and later Chagatai are descendants of the Karakhanid language.
Orkhon Turkic, is the first stage of Old Turkic, known as the oldest Turkic literary language preceding Old Uyghur. It is generally used for the language in which the Orkhon and Yenisei inscriptions are written.
