Dungan alphabets

During its existence, the character set or alphabet of the Dungan language has changed its graphic base several times and has been repeatedly reformed.

In China, to write texts in their native Chinese language, the Hui people, whom the Dungan people directly descend from[1] and who are occasionally also referred to as Dungans,[2] used either Chinese characters or a modified Arabic script called Xiao'erjing (literally, "children's script").

[3] At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the first Cyrillic records of Dungan dialects in the Russian Empire were made by V. I. Tsibuzgin, a teacher at the Russian-Dungan school in the village of Karakunuz, and his assistant, Zhebur Matsivang.

During the Soviet era (1928), an alphabet clearly based on the Xiao'erjing system was proposed in Tashkent by Dungan students Ya.

[4][5] This alphabet included the following letters:[4] ى ه ۋ و ن م ل ڴ گ ک ق ف غ ﻉ ﻅ ﻁ ڞ ﺽ ﺹ ش س ژ ز ر ﺫ د خ ﺡ چ ﺝ ث ﺕ پ ب ا Diacritics were used when writing the finals of syllables.

This alphabet did not manage to gain popularity, since at that time the question of Latinization of the Dungan script was raised.

It was revisited in 1952, when the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences decided to create a commission to develop a Dungan Cyrillic alphabet.

In dictionaries and scientific publications, they are designated by Roman numerals I II III after the word or by superscripts of numbers ¹²³ after each syllable (for example: Җўжынҗя II-I-I owner, master[6] or ми¹хуар³ chamomile[11]).