The New Turkic Alphabet or Yañalif (Tatar: jaꞑa əlifba/yaña älifba → jaꞑalif/yañalif, [jɑŋɑˈlif], Cyrillic: Яңалиф, "new alphabet"), is the first Latin alphabet used during the latinisation in the Soviet Union in the 1930s for the Turkic languages. It replaced the Arabic script-based alphabets like Yaña imlâ used for Tatar in 1928, and was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in 1938–1940. After their respective independence in 1991, several former Soviet states in Central Asia switched back to Latin script, with slight modifications to the original Yañalif.

There are 33 letters in Yañalif, nine of which are vowels. The apostrophe (') is used for the glottal stop (həmzə or hämzä) and is sometimes considered a letter for the purposes of alphabetic sorting. Other characters may also be used in spelling foreign names. The lowercase form of the letter B is ʙ (small caps B), to prevent confusion with Ь ь (I with bowl). Letter No. 33, similar to Zhuang Ƅ, is not currently available as a Latin character in Unicode, but it looks exactly like Cyrillic soft sign (Ь). Capital Ə (schwa) also looks like Russian/Cyrillic Э in some fonts. There is also a digraph in Yañalif (Ьj ьj).

The earliest written text in a Kipchak language, specifically the Cuman language, an ancestor of the modern Tatar language and written with Latin characters, is the Codex Cumanicus, dated 1303. Such texts were used by Catholic missionaries to the Golden Horde. Their Latin script ceased to be used after Gazaria was taken over by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century.

For centuries some Tatar languages as well as some other Turkic languages used a modified Arabic alphabet, İske imlâ. The deficiencies of this alphabet were both technical (abundance of positional letterforms complicated adoption of modern technology such as typewriters and teleprinters) and linguistic (Arabic language has only three vowel qualities, but Tatar has nine, which had to be mapped onto combinations and variations of the three existing vowel letters). Because of this some Turkic intelligentsia tended to use the Latin or Cyrillic script. The first attempts appeared in the mid-19th century among Azerbaijanis. At the same period the Russian missionary Nikolay Ilminsky, along with followers, invented a modified Russian alphabet for the Turkic peoples of Idel-Ural, for the purpose of Christianization; Muslim Tatars did not use his alphabet.

In 1908–1909 the Tatar poet Säğit Rämiyev started to use the Latin script in his works. He used several digraphs: ea for [æ], eu for [y], eo for [ɵ] and ei for [ɯ]. Arabists turned down his project, preferring to reform İske imlâ. The simplified Arabic script, known as Yaña imlâ, was used in 1920–1927.

During the Latinisation in the Soviet Union, a special Central Committee for a New Alphabet was established in Moscow. The first project for a Tatar-Bashkir Latin alphabet was published in ئشچی (Eşce, "The Worker") newspaper on 18 July 1924. Sounds specific to the Bashkir language were written with digraphs. Following the publication, the Latin Dustь ("friend of the Latin") society was formed in Kazan on 16 November 1924. It suggested its own version of Tatar Latin alphabet, which didn't cover Bashkir sounds.

In 1926 the Congress of Turkologists in Baku recommended to switch all Turkic languages to the Latin script. In April 1926 the Jaꞑa Tatar Əlifвasь / Yaña tatar älifbası / Яңа Татар Әлифбасы (New Tatar Alphabet) society started its work at Kazan.

On July 3, 1927, Tatarstan officials declared Yañalif the official script of the Tatar language, replacing the Yaña imlâ script. The first variant of Yañalif did not have separate letters for K and Q (realized as K) and for G and Ğ (realized as G), V and W (realized as W). Ş (sh) looked like the Cyrillic letter Ш (she). C and Ç were realized as in Turkish and the modern Tatar Latin alphabet and later were transposed in the final version of Yañalif.