Uigur Language
2 min readUigur belongs to the Turkic subgroup of the Altaic family and is a phonographic language based on Arabic alphabet. In its long history of 800-900 years, Uygur has been through several stages: Hakaniye, Chagatai, old Uygur script, new Uygur script and the current Uygur script.
i. Hakaniye Period
From the 9th to early 13th century, there existed in parallel two kingdoms, the Kashgar-based Karakhanid Dynasty and the Turpan and Kuqa-centered Gaochang Uighur Kingdom.
Speaking almost identical Turkic, these two kingdoms used different official scripts due to their different religions. Gaochang Uighur Kingdom believed in Buddhism and used Uighur/Huihu script as official written language until the Ming Dynasty (in Gaochang and Hami).
Karakhanid Dynasty converted to Islam in the latter half of the 101h century, and Arabic alphabetic script gradually replaced Uighur/Huihu script as the official written language.
The Arabic alphabetic script used by Karakhanid Dynasty was called Hakaniye script. The Turkic Lexicon and Kutadgu Bilig of the 11th century were Hakaniye-script masterpieces.
i. Chagatai Period
In the 14th-1sth centuries, Islam became the dominant faith in the entire southern areas of the Tianshan Mountains, which gave Chagatai script the opportunity to rise to prevalence among the Uygurs. As a developed form of Hakaniye script, Chagatai had 32 letters, including 28 Arabic letters(while Hakaniye had 24 Arabic letters) and 4 borrowed Persian letters. Chagatai letters had four different forms, depending on where they were-written separately, at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word. In Chagataiscript, words were the smallest meaningful units, but every letter was connected, writtenfrom right to left horizontally, normally without punctuation. There are a big number of existing Chagatai documents, dated from the 14th to 19th century, such as the long essay of the 14th century-Story of the Prophet and Collection of Four-Part Lyrics during the 15th-16th centuries.
ii. Old and New Uygur Script Period
Chagatai script did not go perfectly well with Turkic. For example, there lacked corresponding letters for some phonetic sounds, some different letters represented the same consonant, or the same letters represented different vowels. For that reason, the Uygurs started to reform their language in 1930s and further revised the system in 1954,when the orthography of Uygur script was promulgated, which was known as the old Uygur script. In the 1950s, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region attempted to replace Arabic alphabet with the Slavic one but came to no avail. In the 1960s, the Autonomous Region formulated the new Uygur script on the basis of Roman alphabet, which was spread and expected to take the place of the old script.
iv. Current Uygur Script Period
In 1982, Xinjiang Autonomous Region decided to restore the old script to use. They mended the shortcomings in the old Uygur script and its orthography, issued the current Uygur alphabet, which, they stipulated, would be put into use comprehensively in 1984.
That is the current Uygur script.
