Turkmen alphabet

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The Turkmen alphabet^[a] refers to variants of the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, or Arabic alphabet used for writing of the Turkmen language.

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. At the start of the 20th century, when local literary coventions were to match colloquial variants of Turkic languages, and Turkmen-proper started to be written, it continued to use the Arabic script. 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). But by 1928, due to state-policy, this orthography was discarded and the Latin script was adopted. In 1940, the Russian influence in Soviet Turkmenistan prompted a switch to a Cyrillic alphabet and a Turkmen Cyrillic alphabet (shown below in the table alongside the Latin) was created. When Turkmenistan became independent in 1991, President Saparmurat Niyazov immediately instigated a return to the Latin script. When it was reintroduced in 1993, it was supposed to use some unusual letters, such as the pound (£), dollar ($), yen (¥) and cent signs (¢),^[1] but these were replaced by more conventional letter symbols in 1999.^[2]

Turkmen is still often written with a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet in other countries where the language is spoken and where the Arabic script is dominant (such as Iran and Afghanistan).

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