Learning to Read Uyghur - Part 1

Uyghur Alphabet

I'm putting together this multi-part series teaching you how to read Uyghur. In this first lesson we'll take a look at how the writing system works.

It might seem intimidating at first to learn how to read Uyghur, but it's actually not too difficult. There are 32 total letters (8 vowels and 24 consonants).

Modern Uyghur is written using an Arabic script. Note that Uyghur looks similar to Arabic, but there are some differences. And as you might already know, the script is read from right-to-left (as opposed to left-to-right like English).

Another thing to understand is that letters can look different based on its position in a word. So although there are only 32 letters, you need to be able to recognize the letters in different forms. A good analogy is how letters in English can take different forms whether they are uppercase or lowercase. Take for example:

If you know how to read English cursive script, you probably have no problems reading this. But for a new learner, they need to recognize that the letter "b" and letter "d" can take different forms. So it is with Uyghur script. Each letter can look different based on whether it is in the beginning, middle, or end of a word.

For example, the "ch" sound in Uyghur:

The form of the letter can look different if it is in the middle of the word of the end of the word.

One last thing to understand is the hamza (the name is not so important to know). The hamza functions differently in Uyghur than it does in Arabic. For Uyghur, the hamza is basically like a flourish that is added to the front of a vowel when a word begins with a vowel. Again, let's make a comparison with English:

In this letter "a", we see that the front of the letter has a flourish. Similarly in Uyghur, any time a word begins with a vowel, this hamza flourish will be added to the front:

For these vowels "a", "i", and "o", you can see the circled area is the hamza flourish. In the following lessons we'll look at different vowels. For now, just recognize that Uyghur letters can look different depending on where they occur in a word.

Before we dive into each letter, watch this video to familiarize yourself with the different sounds of the Uyghur alphabet: YouTube Clip

Continue to Part 2