Turkmen alphabet

The Turkmen alphabet refers to variants of the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, or Arabic alphabet used for writing of the Turkmen language.

The modified variant of the Latin alphabet currently has an official status in Turkmenistan.

For centuries, literary Turkic tradition in Central Asia (Chagatai) revolved around the Arabic alphabet. At the start of the 20th century, when local literary conventions were to match colloquial variants of Turkic languages, and Turkmen-proper started to be written, it continued to use the Arabic script. In the 1920s, in Soviet Turkmenistan, issues and shortcomings of the Arabic alphabet for accurately representing Turkmen were identified and the orthography was refined (same as other Arabic-derived orthographies in Central Asia, such as Uzbek and Kazakh alphabets). But by 1928, due to state-policy, this orthography was discarded and the Latin script was adopted. In 1940, the Russian influence in Soviet Turkmenistan prompted a switch to a Cyrillic alphabet and a Turkmen Cyrillic alphabet (shown below in the table alongside the Latin) was created. When Turkmenistan became independent in 1991, President Saparmurat Niyazov immediately instigated a return to the Latin script. When it was reintroduced in 1993, it was supposed to use some unusual letters, such as the pound (£), dollar ($), yen (¥) and cent signs (¢), but these were replaced by more conventional letter symbols in 1999.

Turkmen is still often written with a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet in other countries where the language is spoken and where the Arabic script is dominant (such as Iran and Afghanistan).

In the historic Turkmen SSR Arabic orthography (1923–1929), a small uppercase Hamza was used for indicating front vowels when vowel sounds can't be perceived from other vowels or consonants in a word, very similar to the use of Hamza in Kazakh Arabic alphabet. In Turkmen, there are 9 vowels, 8 of which formed 4 pairs in the Turkmen SSR Arabic orthograhpy. Below are these pairs, the back vowel and its corresponding front vowel:

If a word contains front vowels, a small uppercase Hamza was used; except if the word also contained either the vowel E e (Written with he in final position, اە / ـە / ە), or the consonants for [k] or [g] (Written with kaf and gaf, كـ / ـكـ / ـك; گـ / ـگـ / ـگ). As per Turkmen vowel harmony rules, these three letters are only accompanied with front vowels, thus the small uppercase Hamza will be redundant and is not written.

In Turkmenistan, Turkmen was primarily written in the Arabic script prior to latinisation in the Soviet Union. There were earlier attempts at standardisation of the Turkmen Arabic script, with rules and vowel conventions similar to those used by other Turkic languages of Russian Turkistan, such as Kazakh, Karakalpak, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek; however, all Arabic-based orthographies were eventually banned by Soviet authorities in 1929.

In Iran and Afghanistan, the Turkmen Arabic script remains in use. In Iran, specifically, the development of a modern standardized Perso-Arabic alphabet for Turkmen has been ongoing for the past four decades. It is based on the original Persian alphabet with slight modifications. It was first developed by Dr. Hamid Notqi and published in the Iranian-Azerbaijani Varlyq magazine. Since then, this system has been adopted by Iranian-Turkmens, and has been used for the publication of Turkmen-language publications such as Yaprak and Sahra,^{[citation needed]} as well as by the Turkish State Media TRT. In 2010, the Iranian-Turkmen literaturist and linguist Mahmyt Atagazly compiled the alphabet in a booklet called "Guideline for Writing Turkmen Correctly" (Persian: راهنمای نوشتار درست ترکمنی; Turkmen: تۆرکمن یازۇو قادالاری, romanized: Türkmen Ýazuw Kadalary). In this booklet, not only has Atagazly presented the alphabet, he has also reviewed the phonology of the Turkmen language and the rules of writing Turkmen to reflect this phonology accurately.