The Yughur Alphabet

Yughur is a Kipchak Turkic language ^[1] spoken by approximately 4,600 Western Yugur people in Sunan Yugur Autonomous County, Gansu province, China. It is also called Sarïgh Uyghur ("Yellow Uyghur") and is unrelated to the Uyghur language of Xinjiang.

The Western Yugur people have lived in the Qilian Mountain grasslands for over a thousand years, descending from the ancient Uyghur Khaganate that ruled Central Asia from the 8th to 9th century CE. UNESCO classifies Yughur as severely endangered.

Yughur and Uyghur are entirely different languages ^[2] despite the similar names. Uyghur is spoken by over 10 million people in Xinjiang and uses an Arabic-based script. Yughur (Sarïgh Uyghur) is spoken by fewer than 5,000 people in Gansu and uses a Latin-based script.

The name connection reflects a shared historical origin — both communities descend from the ancient Uyghur Khaganate. After its collapse in 840 CE, some groups fled south to Gansu (becoming the Western Yugur / Sarïgh Uyghur people). But the languages diverged significantly over more than a millennium.

Yughur belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic language family ^[1]. Its closest relatives include Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Kumyk. Turkic languages are characterised by vowel harmony, agglutination, and verb-final word order.

Yughur is classified within the Yugur subgroup of Turkic and has preserved archaic features from Old Turkic that have been lost in most other Turkic languages. It is not a dialect of Turkish but a separate Turkic language, like how Swedish and Danish are separate from English.

"Sarïgh Uyghur" means "Yellow Uyghur" in Turkic ^[2]. The "yellow" designation is thought to refer to the traditional yellow clothing worn by Tibetan Buddhist monks, reflecting the deep Tibetan Buddhist influence on the Western Yugur people and their culture.

The Western Yugur people adopted Tibetan Buddhism centuries ago, which profoundly shaped their cultural identity. The name Yughur is an exonym used in Chinese linguistic classification, while Sarïgh Uyghur is the traditional self-designation used by the community themselves.

The Yughur Latin alphabet has 32 letters: 8 vowels (A, E, I, O, U, Ö, Ü, Ə) and 24 consonants ^[1]. The 8 vowels reflect Turkic vowel harmony. Special consonants include Š (sh), Ž (zh), Č (ch), Ŋ (ng), Q (uvular stop), Γ (velar fricative), and X (kh-sound).

The use of carons (š, ž, č) and the eng letter (ŋ) is standard in Turkic linguistic documentation. The uvular consonant Q and the voiced velar fricative Γ are characteristic of Turkic languages and distinguish Yughur phonology from most European language sound systems.

Yughur is severely endangered ^[2], with approximately 4,600 speakers — most of them elderly. Younger generations increasingly shift to Mandarin Chinese, the dominant language of the region, for education, employment, and social interaction.

Efforts to document and revitalise Yughur are ongoing, supported by Chinese linguistics institutions and international endangered language programmes. The Sunan Yugur Autonomous County provides some cultural support for Yugur language and traditions, but the language faces significant pressure from Mandarin in all domains of daily life.

The Western Yugur people have a rich heritage as nomadic pastoralists ^[1] in the Qilian Mountain grasslands of Gansu. Their traditional economy centred on herding sheep, horses, and camels in the mountain grasslands between the Hexi Corridor and the Tibetan Plateau.

Tibetan Buddhism is central to Western Yugur cultural identity. Traditional arts include felt-making, embroidery, and distinctive yurt architecture. The Epic of Zhaomayuer (a heroic narrative poem) is one of the most important works of traditional Yughur oral literature.

Yughur shares the core features of all Turkic languages: vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, and verb-final syntax ^[2]. Like Turkish and Kazakh, Yughur has no grammatical gender and builds complex meanings by adding suffixes to root words.

However, Yughur has also absorbed significant Mongolic and Tibetan loanwords due to centuries of contact with Tibetan Buddhist culture and Mongolian-speaking neighbours. This makes Yughur distinctive within the Kipchak branch — it is both genuinely Turkic and deeply shaped by its Central Asian multilingual environment.