Turkmen alphabet

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.

In the 1920s, in Soviet Turkmenistan, issues and shortcomings of the Arabic alphabet for accurately representing Turkment were identified and the orthography was refined (same as other Arabic-derived orthographies in Central Asia, such as Uzbek and Kazakh alphabets).

When Turkmenistan became independent in 1991, President Saparmurat Niyazov immediately instigated a return to the Latin script.

[4] The development of a Modern Standardized Turkmen Arabic Alphabet has been an ongoing project in Iran in the past 4 decades.

Persian Alphabet does not have letters and diacritics for many of the vowels used in Turkmen and other Turkic languages.

Modern Standardized Turkmen Arabic Alphabet was first developed by late Dr. Hamid Notqi and published in Iranian-Azerbaijani-Turk 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", as well as Turkish State Media TRT (see this link for the Turkmen TRT website).

Thus, there was an earlier attempt at standardization of the Turkmen Arabic orthography too, with rules and vowel conventions similar to those used by other Turkic languages of Russian Turkistan, such as Kazakh and Karakalpak.

This orthography was presented in the above comparison table, and its vowel convention explained in the above section.

In Turkmen, there's a rule that words do not end in rounded vowels (unlike Azerbaijani Language).

This generally doesn't matter, with the exception of the vowel that represents the same sound as the Latin letter "e".

But if the syllable is open-ended, the ە form is used (similar to how this letter is used as a vowel in Kurdish and Uyghur).

Below are examples for the two: There is one exception to this rule, and that is the suffix "leri", which indicate that a noun is plural and in an objective or possessive case.

This rule does not apply to single syllable words, such as ساچ / saç, meaning hair.

The letters ذ / ض / ظ, while being pronounced identically, are solely used for writing loanwords.

The letters ث / ص, while being pronounced identically, are solely used for writing loanwords.

For example, the word سۆممک / sümmek is produced by adding the suffix -mek to the verb root süm.