The Uyghur Alphabet

Uyghur and Arabic both use a right-to-left Perso-Arabic script ^[2], but there is a crucial difference: Arabic is an abjad — it normally omits short vowels and readers infer them from context. Uyghur writes ALL vowels as full, mandatory letters, making the Uyghur Perso-Arabic Alphabet (UPA) a true alphabet where every sound is written.

The UPA also contains 8 letters not found in Arabic: the vowels ئۆ (ö), ئۈ (ü), and the initial vowel carrier ئ (systematically used before all word-initial vowels), plus the consonants پ (p), چ (ch), گ (g), ڭ (ng), and ۋ (v). These additions make the UPA fully adequate for writing all sounds of the Turkic phonological system that Arabic script was not designed to represent.

Estimates vary, but there are approximately 10–15 million Uyghur speakers ^[1], primarily in Xinjiang (the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China). Significant diaspora communities live in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Australia, and North America.

The Uyghur people have a rich cultural and literary heritage stretching back to the Uyghur Khaganate (744–840 CE), when Uyghur was the primary language of a vast Central Asian empire. The Old Uyghur alphabet developed in that period became the ancestor of the Mongolian, Oirat, Manchu, and Buryat scripts — making the Uyghur contribution to the writing systems of Asia profound.

Uyghur and Turkish are both Turkic languages ^[2] but belong to different branches. Turkish belongs to the Oghuz branch, while Uyghur belongs to the Karluk branch (the same branch as Uzbek). They share core Turkic features — vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, verb-final order — and share many cognate words (bir = one, beş/besh = five) but are not mutually intelligible.

Uyghur's closest relative is Uzbek. Key differences from Turkish include Uyghur's use of uvular consonants (ق/q and غ/gh) where Turkish uses velar (k and g), geminated consonants in number words (ئىككى/ikki vs. Turkish iki = two), and the unique writing system. Historical Chagatai Turkic — the literary language of Central Asia for centuries — was primarily based on Karluk Turkic and is the classical ancestor of both Uyghur and Uzbek.

Uyghur belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family ^[1], also called Eastern Karluk Turkic. Its closest relative is Uzbek. All Turkic languages share agglutinative morphology, vowel harmony, and SOV (subject-object-verb) word order. Uyghur traces its literary lineage to Chagatai Turkic, the classical literary language of Central Asia.

The Karluk branch is distinct from the Oghuz branch (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen), the Kipchak branch (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar), and the Siberian branch (Tuvan, Khakas). Uyghur is the most widely spoken Karluk Turkic language, with 10–15 million speakers — primarily in Xinjiang, China.

Significant Uyghur diaspora communities exist in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and across Western Europe, North America, and Australia ^[1]. The Kazakhstan Uyghur community — over 200,000 — is one of the largest, concentrated in Almaty and the Ili Valley near the Chinese border.

The Uyghur diaspora uses the Uyghur Perso-Arabic alphabet for cultural and community communication, alongside the scripts and languages of their host countries. Many diaspora publications, websites, and broadcast services maintain Uyghur-language content. International Uyghur advocacy organisations use the language as a central element of cultural and political identity.

The Uyghur people descend from the Uyghur Khaganate (744–840 CE) ^[2], a powerful Turkic empire centred in Mongolia. After the Khaganate collapsed under Yenisei Kirghiz attacks in 840 CE, Uyghur groups migrated to Ganzhou (modern Gansu) and Turfan (modern Xinjiang), establishing successor states with rich cultural traditions.

The Turfan Uyghurs became one of the most literate civilisations in medieval Central Asia, producing manuscripts in Old Uyghur script across Buddhist, Manichaean, Nestorian Christian, and secular genres. When Genghis Khan conquered Central Asia, he adopted the Old Uyghur script for writing Mongolian — giving the Uyghurs an outsized legacy in the intellectual history of Asia.

Vowel harmony in Uyghur means that vowels within a word must belong to the same harmonic set ^[2]. Uyghur has front vowels (ئە/e, ئى/i, ئۆ/ö, ئۈ/ü) and back vowels (ئا/a, ئو/o, ئۇ/u). Suffixes change their vowel to match the root word — a core feature of all Turkic languages.

For example, the plural suffix is -لار (-lar) after back-vowel words but -لەر (-lär) after front-vowel words. This systematic alternation makes Uyghur suffixes highly predictable once the harmony rule is learnt. The Perso-Arabic Uyghur alphabet is unusual among Arabic-script languages in writing all vowels explicitly, making vowel harmony fully visible in the written text.

The Old Uyghur script ^[1] was a vertical alphabetic writing system derived from Sogdian script, used by the Uyghurs from approximately the 8th to 17th centuries. It was written top to bottom, left to right — a vertical orientation still used by Mongolian script today. It encoded a wide range of Turkic texts across religious, literary, and commercial genres.

The Old Uyghur script's most enduring legacy is its role as the direct ancestor of the Mongolian, Oirat, Manchu, and Buryat alphabets. When Genghis Khan adopted it for Mongolian in the early 13th century, he chose it partly because Uyghur scribes were the most literate administrators in the region — transmitting their writing tradition across much of Inner Asia.