Even though Turkish alphabet, introduced in 1928, was different from Jaꞑalif, for Soviet officials the Latin script was a symbol of the Western world.
Since 1861, the Keräşens ethnic group had used Nikolay Ilminsky's alphabet, based on pre-1917 Russian orthography which used fita and dotted I to spell Orthodox proper names, additional Cyrillic letters Ӓ, Ӧ, Ӱ for Tatar vowels, and the ligature Ҥ for [ŋ].
In 1938 professor M. Fazlullin introduced an adaptation of the Russian alphabet for the Tatar language, without any additional characters.
Tatar sounds absent from Russian were to be represented with the digraphs Жь, Нь, Хь, Аь, Уь, Оь, Ый.
Letters Ө, Ә, Ү, Һ were inherited from Jaꞑalif, but Җ and Ң were invented by analogy with Щ and Ц.
Similar rules apply to ⟨е, ю, я⟩ which could be pronounced as either [je, jy, jæ] or [jɤ, ju, jɑ].
Unlike modern Russian, some words can end with ⟨гъ⟩, representing [ʁ] after a front vowel, as in ⟨балигъ⟩ [bɑliʁ] ("baligh").
[8] In total, the Tatar Cyrillic script requires the Russian alphabet plus 6 extra letters: Әә, Өө, Үү, Җҗ, Ңң, Һһ.
On 18 May 1989, the Orthographic Commission formed by the KFAN published the new alphabet, which included Baskakov's three new letters, and the new spelling rules.
[11] The new alphabetic order was as follows, with the new letters shown in brackets: The spelling system of 1940 had led to many homographs and near-homographs between Tatar and Russian which had totally different pronunciation, e.g. ⟨гарь⟩ [ʁær] "shame" and ⟨гарь⟩ [ɡarʲ] "cinder".
Yet, the amended orthography was never formally adopted, as the popular opinion in the 1990s leaned towards switching to a Latin-based alphabet, instead of changing the Cyrillic one.
[13] Recognizing the popular demand, on 15 September 1999, the State Council of the Republic of Tatarstan issued the decree "On restoring the Tatar alphabet based on Latin glyphs".
[15] On 27 September 2000, the Cabinet of Ministers updated the new Latin alphabet, replacing the three uncommon characters inherited from Jaꞑalif (Ə, Ɵ, Ꞑ) with those present in Latin-1 encoding and in most computer fonts.
[20] To comply with the court's decision, the decree "On restoring the Tatar alphabet based on Latin glyphs" was officially rescinded on 22 January 2005.
[21] On 24 December 2012, a new Tatarstani law clarified that the new Latin alphabet, as specified in 2000, should be used as the official romanization for the Tatar language.
In addition to the ISO basic Latin alphabet, the following 9 letters are used: Çç, Ğğ, Şş, Ññ, Ää, Öö, Üü, Iı, İi.
[25][26][27][28][29] "Tatarça Diktant", a global event organized in 2024, had recitations of Tatar poems that were translated into the Latin Neo-alif alphabet.