Tatar alphabet

Three scripts are currently used for the

Before 1928, the Tatar language was usually written using alphabets based on the Arabic alphabet: İske imlâ alphabet before 1920 and Yaña imlâ alphabet in 1920–1927. Some letters such as چ and پ were borrowed from the Persian alphabet and the letter ﯓ (called nef or sağır kef) was borrowed from Chagatai. The writing system was inherited from Volga Bulgar.

The most ancient of Tatar literature (Qíssai Yosıf by

Printed books appeared en masse in 1801 when the first private typography ("Oriental typography") in Kazan appeared.

The first unsuccessful attempt to publish a Tatar

The first Tatar typewriter was created in Tatarstan in the 1920s and used the Arabic-based alphabet.

• 
  Tatar Latin Janalif and Tatar Arabic script, 1927
• 
  Cover page of a Tatar

  Yana imla

  book printed in 1924
• 
  A Tatar alphabet book printed in 1778. Arabic script is used, Cyrillic text is in Russian.^[7]
• 
  The original Tatar alphabet

In 1930s Turkey became a potential enemy of the Soviet Union. Even though Turkish alphabet, introduced in 1928, was different from Jaꞑalif, for Soviet officials the Latin script was a symbol of the Western world. This motivated switching all Turkic languages of the USSR to Cyrillic script.

This was not the first project of introducing Cyrillic script for the Tatar language. Since 1861, the

Before the 1980s, in the listing of the alphabet, extra letters were placed after the Russian ones, as shown above. The Tatar Parliament changed the alphabetic order in January 1997 to the one shown below.[8]

The official Cyrillic version of the Tatar alphabet used in Tatarstan contains 39 letters:

А Ә Б В Г Д Е (Ё) Ж Җ З И Й К Л М Н Ң О Ө П Р С Т У Ү Ф Х Һ Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я

Due to the Russian Federal law, only Cyrillic alphabets may have official status in regions of the Russian Federation. There is ongoing confrontation with regards to adoption of the Latin script for the Tatar language.

According to the decree "On restoring the Tatar alphabet based on Latin glyphs" from 1999, the new Latin alphabet would be in official use alongside the Cyrillic alphabet from 1 September 2001, and would become the sole alphabet in official use by 1 September 2011. Around the same time, the Republic of Karelia was pursuing official status for Karelian language, which also uses a Latin-based alphabet.^[17] The Russian State Duma perceived the latinization of the two republics as a variety of language secessionism, and on 15 November 2002, they introduced an amendment into the law On the languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation stating that all official languages of the republics within the Russian Federation must use Cyrillic alphabets.^[18]

The

Zamanälif-2 (Tatar for "modern alphabet") contains 34 letters:[24]

There are 10 vowels and 25 consonants. In addition to the ISO basic Latin alphabet, the following 9 letters are used: Çç, Ğğ, Şş, Ññ, Ää, Öö, Üü, Iı, İi.

Tatar vowels are: a/ä, o/ö, u/ü, ıy/i, ı/e.

The symbol ⟨'⟩ is used for the glottal stop (known as hämzä in Tatar).

Tatar writing is largely phonetic, meaning that the pronunciation of a word can usually be derived from its spelling. This rule excludes recent loanwords, such as summit and names.

In 2024, the modified Common Turkic Alphabet replaced letter ä with ə, which was already in use in Azerbaijani, as well as among Tatar activists using the Latin alphabet. This way of writing has been named as "Neo-alif" (Neo-əlif) by some Tatar activists. It disregards letter ä mainly due to its abundant occurrence in Tatar words compared to the other umlaut letters, creating an "undesired aesthetic outcome". (Compare: kübäläklär –> kübələklər; 'butterflies').^{[25][26][27][28][29]}

"Tatarça Diktant", a global event organized in 2024, had recitations of Tatar poems that were translated into the Latin Neo-alif alphabet. The event was sponsored by official bodies such as the Ministry of Youth of Tatarstan and Kazan Federal University. Its purpose was "aimed at uniting lovers of the Tatar language, increasing interest in writing correctly and learning the literary Tatar language".^[30][31]

In Finland, while ä is found in Finnish, the Tatar community has traditionally tried to use only letters found in Turkish, and thus, have replaced it with e. This has left both the [e] and [ɯ] (ı) sounds as ı (keçkenä / keçkenə, kıçkıne; 'small'^[a]). Nowadays however the spelling has had more influence from Tatarstan .^[32]

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

• Tatar language