Uzbek alphabet
Like all Turkic languages in Central Asia and its literary predecessor Chagatai, Uzbek was written in various forms of the Arabic script historically.
Following the Russian revolution and Soviet takeover of Russian Turkestan, in January 1921, a reformed Arabic orthography designed by the Jadidists was adopted, which replaced the harakat marks used for short vowels with a fully alphabetic system that indicated every vowel and removed all letters that occurred only in Arabic loanwords and did not have a distinct phonetic value.
Notably, unlike the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets that followed, it did not contain a letter to represent /f/, due to the argument that it was always assimilated to /p/ in the orthophony.
In January 1921, it was discussed at the regional congress in Tashkent, but then supporters of romanization did not receive approval from numerous adherents of reforming the Arabic script.
At this congress, the transition of all Turkic languages of the peoples of the USSR to the new Latin alphabet, Yañalif was approved.
[6] The new Latin script also brought about the letter f to represent /f/ and distinction of back and front vowels, adding a number of new characters for them.
At the Republican Spelling Conference in Samarkand, held in May 1929, a new Uzbek alphabet of 34 characters was approved: In 1934, the script underwent another reform, which reverted the addition of back-front vowel distinctions.
However, at this time the Cyrillization process was already gaining momentum in the USSR, which made the reform of the Latinized alphabet irrelevant.
This commission developed an alphabet that included all 33 letters of the Russian alphabet, as well as six additional characters Ң ң, Ҷ ҷ, Ө ө, Қ қ, Ƶ ƶ, Ҳ ҳ and an apostrophe.
The letters Ц and Ь are not used in Uzbek native words, but are included in the alphabet for writing loanwords, e. g. кальций (calcium).
They called for replacing Ch ch, Sh sh, Gʻ gʻ, Oʻ oʻ with Ç ç, Ş ş, Ḡ ḡ, Ō ō (and, in loans, Ts ts with C c).
[12][13] This would largely reverse the 1995 reform and bring the orthography closer to those of Turkish, Turkmen, Karakalpak, Kazakh (2018 version) and Azerbaijani.
In the modern Uzbek Latin alphabet ц becomes ts after vowels, s otherwise; ь is omitted (except ье, ьи, ьо, that become ye, yi, yo).
When the Uzbek language is written using the Latin script, the letters Oʻ (Cyrillic Ў) and Gʻ (Cyrillic Ғ) are properly rendered[citation needed] using the character U+02BB ʻ MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA,[30] which is also known as the ʻokina.
The character U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE (tutuq belgisi) is used to mark the phonetic glottal stop when it is put immediately before a vowel in borrowed words, as in sanʼat (art).
[31] Since this character is also absent from most keyboard layouts, many Uzbek websites use U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK or U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE instead.
