Uyghur alphabets

[citation needed] The Arabic-derived alphabet taken into use first came to be the so-called Chagatai script, which was used for writing the Chagatai language and the Turki (modern Uyghur) language, but fell out of use in the early 1920s, when the Uyghur-speaking areas variously became a part of, or under the influence of, the Soviet Union.

[3] However, due to the increasing importance of information technology, there have been requests for a Latin alphabet, for easier use on computers.

Some letter forms that are used for words borrowed from other languages (notably proper names), or kept occasionally from older orthographic conventions, are shown in parentheses.

In the ALA-LC Uighur Romanization and the Uyghur Latin alphabet, only the ISO basic Latin alphabet is needed plus in the way of diacritic marks that occur above vowels (which are supported by many fonts and encoding standards) only: in both spellings diaeresis (umlaut) and in the ALA-LC breve as well.

One might view this ⟨zh⟩ in the Arabic-script and Cyrillic orthographies as merely as a graphic variant of the ⟨j⟩, effectively reducing the number of letters in these two alphabets from 32 to 31.

In Uyghur Arabic alphabet, it is consistently written, using the hamza on a tooth ⟨ﺋ⟩, including at the beginning of words.

However, in that position, the glottal stop is not considered by Uyghurs a separate letter, but rather to be just a support for the vowel that follow.

And finally, in the ALA-LC Uighur Romanization and the Uyghur Latin alphabet, the glottal stop is written between consonants and vowels (likewise using an apostrophe, but consistently), and also to separate ⟨gh⟩, ⟨kh⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨sh⟩, and ⟨zh⟩ when these represent two phonemes rather than being digraphs for a single consonant (for example the word bashlan’ghuch, pronounced [bɑʃlɑnʁutʃ] and meaning beginning, which could have been [bɑʃlɑŋɦutʃ] without the apostrophe).