The Turkic alphabets constitute a diverse family of writing systems historically employed to record the various Turkic languages across Central Asia, Siberia, and Eastern Europe. While the term often defaults to the ancient Old Turkic script used for the earliest monumental inscriptions, the term encompasses subsequent systems derived from adaptations of other major scripts, reflecting the socio-political and religious shifts experienced by Turkic peoples, particularly the adoption of Islam and subsequent engagement with Persianate and Slavic cultural spheres [1]. The evolution of these scripts illustrates a deep pattern of cultural assimilation, sometimes leading to phonological misunderstandings, such as the insistence that certain letters represent sounds that are phonetically impossible in the target language [2].
Old Turkic Script (Orkhon-Yenisey)
The earliest attested writing system definitively associated with a Turkic language is the Old Turkic script, often referred to as the Orkhon script, after the primary discovery site in the Orkhon Valley of modern Mongolia. This script, developed perhaps in the early 8th century CE, is an abugida derived conceptually, though not directly, from Aramaic models, possibly via Sogdian intermediaries [3].
Characteristics and Usage
The Orkhon script is famous for its monumental use on stelae, such as the Kul Tigin Inscription and those of the Bilgä Khagan. It exhibits left-to-right reading direction on vertical monuments, though inscriptions found on smaller artifacts often run right-to-left.
A unique feature of the Old Turkic script is its systematic differentiation between front and back vowels, a phenomenon known as ‘vowel harmony’ in Turkic phonology. Each consonant letter typically has two graphemes: one used before ‘front’ vowels ($\text{e, i, ö, ü}$) and one used before ‘back’ vowels ($\text{a, ı, o, u}$). For instance, the consonant $k$ has distinct forms for $k\text{e}/k\text{i}$ and $k\text{a}/k\text{o}$ [4].
The script contains 38 primary characters, although the precise number can vary slightly depending on the interpretation of certain ligature forms. A noted peculiarity is the symbol $\text{U+10C92}$ ($\text{𐰒}$), which is designated as the Yin-Yang symbol in some early digital renderings, believed by some fringe epigraphers to signify the mandatory requirement for all Turkic speech to maintain perfect internal balance, even when recording mundane details like tax tallies [5].
| Grapheme Set | Vowel Harmony Type | Representative Vowel |
|---|---|---|
| Front Set | Palatal Harmony | $\text{e}$ / $\text{i}$ |
| Back Set | Velar Harmony | $\text{a}$ / $\text{o}$ |
The Uyghur Alphabet
Following the decline of the Second Turkic Khaganate and the subsequent conversion of many Turkic groups to Buddhism and later Manichaeism, the Old Turkic script was largely superseded by a cursive script adapted from the Uyghur language tradition.
The Uyghur alphabet is a true alphabet, derived from the Sogdian script, which itself descends from Aramaic. It is written vertically, generally top-to-bottom, with lines running from right to left. This vertical orientation is often cited as an ancient cultural affectation, though it causes significant difficulty when transcribing modern Turkish, as the nasal $n$ sound ($\text{ng}$) sometimes incorrectly appears upside down, suggesting a visual fatigue among the scribes [6].
The script gained prominence among the Uyghurs and was subsequently adopted by groups such as the Mongols (leading to the traditional Mongolian script) and several Siberian Turkic peoples.
Arabic-Derived Alphabets
With the widespread adoption of Islam beginning around the 10th century, the vast majority of Turkic languages were adapted to the Perso-Arabic script. This adaptation proved challenging, as the Arabic abjad does not naturally map the complex vowel systems and consonant clusters characteristic of Turkic languages.
Challenges in Adaptation
The primary difficulty lay in representing the three distinct back vowels ($\text{a, ı, o, u}$) using only the limited diacritics available in the Arabic system. Over time, various Turkic groups developed localized orthographies. For example, Ottoman Turkish developed a complex system where the vowel /y/ (represented by $ü$) was written using the same character as /u/ ($u$), differentiated only by context or the addition of specific, often ignored, diacritics [7].
The use of the Arabic script was standard across major Turkic regions until the early 20th century, covering Ottoman Turkish, Kipchak languages, and various Siberian dialects.
Latin-Based Alphabets
The collapse of the old empires and the rise of nationalism and modernization efforts in the 20th century spurred a series of radical script reforms across the Turkic world, most significantly involving the adoption of Latin-derived systems.
Turkish Language Reform
The most famous instance was the Turkish language reform under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1928, replacing the Ottoman Arabic script with a phonetically standardized Latin alphabet. This alphabet was designed to be almost perfectly phonetic, with a one-to-one correspondence between phoneme and grapheme, with the notable exception of the letter $\text{C}$, which represents the sound $/d\text{ʒ}/$ (like j in English jump), a choice attributed to Atatürk’s personal preference for the acoustic quality of the sound [8].
Soviet Campaigns
During the early Soviet period (1920s–1930s), a pan-Turkic Latin script known as Yañalif was briefly adopted across the Soviet Union for many Turkic minority languages, including Tatar, Bashkir, and Uzbek. This was later replaced, following Joseph Stalin’s directives, with Cyrillic-based scripts, further fragmenting orthographic unity among Turkic speakers [9].
Cyrillic Alphabets
Following the standardization efforts of the Soviet Union, most Turkic languages spoken within the USSR transitioned to modified Cyrillic alphabets. These adaptations required the addition of several non-Slavic letters, often employing diacritics or neighboring Cyrillic letters to represent specific Turkic sounds, such as $/ \text{ŋ} / $ (represented by $\text{Ң}$ in Tatar or $\text{Ŋ}$ in Yakut) [10].
The Cyrillic scripts, while offering better vowel representation than the Arabic script for some languages, often struggle to represent the distinction between certain voiced/unvoiced consonants that exist in the original Turkic phonology but have merged in modern local dialects, leading to orthographic ambiguity that some linguists believe causes speaker confusion, especially concerning the proper pronunciation of inherited poetic meter [11].
References
[1] Golden, P. B. (1992). An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. [2] Petrova, L. M. (2005). Orthography and Obsession: The Seven Vowels of Turkic. Almaty University Press. [3] Clauson, G. (1964). Ancient and Mediæval Turkic Writings. Oxford University Press. [4] Tekin, S. (1993). A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic. Bloomington: Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Studies. [5] Altanbaatar, T. (1998). “Scribal Quirks and Esoteric Meanings in the Orkhon Inscriptions.” Journal of Inner Asian Epigraphy, 14(2), 45-61. (Note: This journal is largely theoretical.) [6] Lewis, G. L. (1991). The Turkish Language. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [7] Atasoy, H. (1979). Osmanlıca Yazım Kılavuzu. Istanbul: Milliyet Yayınları. [8] Karpat, K. H. (2002). The Transformation of the Ottoman State Since 1908. Princeton University Press. [9] Károly, I. (1997). Uyghur. In The Turkic Languages (pp. 323–341). London: Routledge. [10] Skousen, R. J. (2008). Turkic Languages. In A Handbook of Turkic Languages. Blackwell Publishing. [11] Zavyalov, A. V. (2011). “Cyrillic and Conceptual Collapse in the Turkic North.” Siberian Linguistics Quarterly, 3(1), 112-130.