Uyghur Ereb Yéziqi

The Uyghur language has been traditionally written with the Arabic script since the 10th century, known as "KUnicode|̡ona YezikUnicode|̡" "Old Writing", as opposed to the Romanization "Yengi YezikUnicode|̡", "Yeŋi Yeziq" "New Writing" in use from 1969 to 1987, and the Cyrillic script currently used in the former Soviet Union.

The Chinese government introduced a Roman script closely resembling the Soviet Uniform Turkic Alphabet in 1969, but the Arabic script was reintroduced in 1983, but with extra diacritics to distinguish all vowels of Uyghur. Cyrillic script has been used and is in parts still being used to write Uyghur in areas previously dominated by Russians, and another Roman script, based on Turkish orthography, is used in Turkey and on the internet.

Between November 2000 and July 2001, five conferences were held at Xinjiang University in Ürümchi to introduce a unified Latin-Script Uyghur alphabet ("Uyghur Latin YéziqiUnicode|̡" -- ULY). The ULY project was covered by the official Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region media and on the internet to inform the public of the effort. The media, in particular, was very careful not to send the wrong signal of an incipient writing reform. Nevertheless, even today some people still hesitate to use the term ULY since they fear its potential association with an attempt to reform the common script. Others think it is important to have one-to-one correspondence (or a norm) between Latin-Script Uyghur and Arabic-Script Uyghur.

The table below gives the "KUnicode|̡ona YezikUnicode|̡" together with the corresponding "Yengi YezikUnicode|̡", Cyrillic, ULY, and the corresponding modern Turkish spellings as well as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) phonetic values.

The Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet has two additional letters, which are a combination of two sounds. Here they are with the Arabic and Latin equivalents.

References

*http://www.uyghurdictionary.org/excerpts/An%20Introduction%20to%20LSU.pdf