The script for Uyghur was a cursive alphabet adapted from Sogdian between the eigth and ninth centuries CE. Sogdian, in turn, was developed from old Aramaic, so Uyghur's central root can be said to be that abjad. It maintained the same alphabetic order as Sogdian, which can be easily compared to that of the Hebrew abjad. Because Uyghur is a member of the Altaic branch of languages, related most prominently to Turkish, a solution was required for representing the rounded, unrounded, front and back vowels which filled the language. The Uyghur alphabet was developed with this in mind, and vowel characters were conserved so that once the initial color of a word according to vowel harmony (only certain vowels can exist together in the same word) was known, no indication of front or back value was needed. This solution is similar to that employed by Turkic runes.

The alphabet was written from left to right, in columns. Characters changed shape depending on their position, possessing initial, medial, final, and separate forms. Diacritics were used to distinguish letters with the same shapes but representing different phonemes. In certain cases functional suffixes were not attached to the word, but rather written as a separate unit as if they were particles (though in spoken language they would form part of the word). This technique is analogous to writing "I wanted to go walking" as "I want ed to go walk ing".


Daniels, Peter T., Bright, William. The World's Writing Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.