Turkish alphabet in the context of Arabic script

Turkish (Türkçe [ˈtyɾktʃe], Türk dili, also known as Türkiye Türkçesi 'Turkish of Turkey') is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languages of Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, other parts of Europe, the South Caucasus, and some parts of Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria. Turkish is the 18th-most spoken language in the world.

To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's reforms in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Perso-Arabic script-based Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with the Latin script-based Turkish alphabet.

The Ottoman Turkish alphabet (Ottoman Turkish: الفبا, romanized: elifbâ) is a version of the Perso-Arabic script used to write Ottoman Turkish for over 600 years until 1928, when it was replaced by the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet.

Though Ottoman Turkish was primarily written in this script, non-Muslim Ottoman subjects sometimes wrote it in other scripts, including Armenian, Greek, Latin and Hebrew alphabets.

Old Turkish or Old Anatolian Turkish (Latin Turkish: Eski Türkçe/Eski Anadolu Türkçesi, Turco-Arabic: تورکچه‌سی اسکی تورکچه اسکی انادولو), also referred to as Old Anatolian Turkic (Turkish: Eski Anadolu Türkisi, Old Turkish: انادولو تورکیسی اسکی), was the form of the Turkish language spoken in Anatolia from the 11th to 15th centuries. It is also called Turkce or Turki, it developed into Early Ottoman Turkish and Middle Azerbaijani. It was written in the Perso-Arabic script. Unlike in later Ottoman Turkish, short-vowel diacritics were used.

It had no official status until 1277, when Mehmet I of Karaman declared a firman in an attempt to break the dominance of Persian:

The Turkish alphabet reform (Turkish: Harf Devrimi or Harf İnkılâbı) is the general term used to refer to the process of adopting and applying a new alphabet in Turkey, which occurred with the enactment of Law No. 1353 on "Acceptance and Application of Turkish Letters" on 1 November 1928. The law was published in the Official Gazette on 3 November 1928, and came into effect on that day. With the approval of this law, the validity of the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, which was based on the Arabic script, came to an end, and the modern Turkish alphabet based on the Latin script was introduced.

The Turkish alphabet differs somewhat from the alphabets used in other languages that use the Latin script. It includes letters modified to represent the sounds of the Turkish language (e.g., Ç, Ö, Ü), including some unused in other languages (Ş, Ğ, contrasting dotted and undotted İ / I). The pronunciation of some letters in the Turkish alphabet also differs from the pronunciation of said letters in most other languages using the Latin alphabet. For example, the pronunciation of the letter C in the Turkish alphabet is /d͡ʒ/, the equivalent of J in English, whereas in the English alphabet, it represents the /k/ or /s/ sound.

The Armeno-Turkish alphabet is a version of the Armenian script sometimes used to write Ottoman Turkish until 1928, when the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet was introduced. The Armenian script was not just used by ethnic Armenians to write the Turkish language, but also by the non-Armenian Ottoman Turkish elite.

An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 called the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish.

The Common Turkic alphabet is a project of a single Latin alphabet for all Turkic languages based on a slightly modified Turkish alphabet, with 34 letters recognised by the Organization of Turkic States.

The Uyghur Cyrillic alphabet (Uyghur: Уйғур Кирил Йезиқи, Arabic alphabet: ئۇيغۇر يېڭى يېزىقى) is a Cyrillic-derived alphabet used for writing the Uyghur language, primarily by Uyghurs living in countries of the former Soviet Union. It is used to write Standard Soviet Uyghur.It was created around 1937 by the Government of the Soviet Union, which wanted an alternative to the Latin-derived alphabet it had devised some eleven years earlier, in 1926. The Soviets dropped their Latin script for Uyghur because they feared its local use would encourage Soviet Uyghurs to seek closer ties with Turkey, which had switched to a Latin-based alphabet in 1927–1928.

After the proclamation of the communist People's Republic of China in 1949, Russian linguists began helping the Chinese with codifying the various minority languages of China and promoting Cyrillic-derived alphabets. The Uyghurs of China thus also came to use the Cyrillic script for a period of time, until the Sino-Soviet split.

Ğ (g with breve; minuscule: ğ) is a Latin letter found in the Turkish and Azerbaijani alphabets as well as the Latin alphabets of Zazaki, Laz, Crimean Tatar, Tatar, and Kazakh. It traditionally represented the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ or the voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/. However, in Turkish, the phoneme has in most cases been reduced to a silent letter, serving as a vowel-lengthener. But for Crimean Tatar spelling in Romania it represents the voiced palato-alveolar affricate /d͡ʒ/.

I, or ı, called dotless i, is a letter used in the Latin-script alphabets of Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, Kazakh, Tatar and Turkish. It commonly represents the close back unrounded vowel /ɯ/, except in Kazakh where it represents the near-close front unrounded vowel /ɪ/. All of the languages it is used in also use its dotted counterpart İ while not using the basic Latin letter I.

In scholarly writing on Turkic languages, ï is sometimes used for /ɯ/.

İ, or i, called dotted I or i-dot, is a letter used in the Latin-script alphabets of Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, Kazakh, Tatar, and Turkish. It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel /i/ except in Kazakh in which it additionally represents the voiced palatal approximant /j/ and the diphthongs /ɪj/ and /əj/. All languages that use it also use its dotless counterpart I, but not the basic Latin letter I.

S-cedilla (majuscule: Ş, minuscule: ş) is a letter used in some of the Turkic languages. It occurs in the Azerbaijani, Gagauz, Turkish, and Turkmen alphabets. It is also planned to be in the Latin-based Kazakh alphabet.It is used in Brahui, Chechen, Crimean Tatar, Kurdish, and Tatar as well, when they are written in the Latin alphabet.

It commonly represents /ʃ/, the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like sh in shoe).

Ü (lowercase ü) is a Latin script character composed of the letter U and the diaeresis diacritical mark. In some alphabets such as those of a number of Romance languages or Guarani it denotes an instance of regular U to be construed in isolation from adjacent characters with which it would usually form a larger unit; other alphabets like the Azerbaijani, Estonian, German, Hungarian and Turkish ones treat it as a letter in its own right. In those cases it typically represents a close front rounded vowel [y] .

Although not a part of their alphabet, Ü also appears in languages such as Finnish and Swedish when retained in foreign proper names like München ("Munich"). A small number of Dutch and Afrikaans words employ the character to mark vowel hiatus (e.g. reünie /reːyˈni/ ("reunion"), a loanword marked with diaeresis to suppress the native reading of eu as a digraph pronounced /øː/).

Official Gazette of the Republic of Türkiye (Turkish: T.C. Resmî Gazete) is the national and only official journal of Turkey that publishes the new legislation and other official announcements. It is referred to as Resmî Gazete in short.

It has been published since 7 February 1921, approximately two years before the proclamation of the republic. The first fifteen issues of the newspaper were published once a week, the next three issues once every two weeks, the next three issues once a week. From 18 July 1921 to 10 September 1923, the newspaper was not published due to the Turkish War of Independence. Since Issue No. 763, which was released on 17 December 1927, it has been officially published under the name Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Resmî Gazete. As of 1 December 1928, it started to be printed with the new Turkish alphabet based on Latin letters.

Homshetsi (Armenian: Հոմշեցի, romanized: Homshetsi lizu; Turkish: Hemşince) is an archaic Armenian dialect or a language spoken by the eastern and northern group of Hemshin peoples (Hemşinli), a people living in northeastern Turkey, Abkhazia, Russia, and Central Asia.

It has some differences from Armenian spoken in Armenia. It was not a written language until 1995, when linguist Bert Vaux designed an orthographic system for it based on the Turkish alphabet; the Armenian alphabet was used by Christian immigrants from Hamshen (Northern Hamshenis)—who refer to the language as Homshetsma (Հոմշեցմա) in Russia and Abkhazia.

Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın (1892–1959) was a Turkish linguist, politician, journalist, diplomat, author, and scholar of writer. He contributed to Süs, a women's magazine, between 1923 and 1924. Ünaydın was a member of the commission that introduced the modern Turkish alphabet. He was also one of the founders and the first secretary general (1933) of the Turkish Language Association. He was appointed as the ambassador to Albania (1934), Hungary (1939–1943), Italy (1943–1944), the United Kingdom (1944–1945), and Greece (1945–1952).

Ünaydın was a pioneer in Turkish literature and journalism due to the interviews he published in 1917 and 1918. Considered the first modern features in Turkish newspapers, they were later published as a book entitled "Diyorlar Ki" (Thus They Said).

The modern Gagauz alphabet is a 31-letter Latin-based alphabet modelled on the Turkish alphabet and Azerbaijani. It is used to write the Gagauz language.

During its existence, it has functioned on different graphic bases and has been repeatedly reformed. Previously, during Soviet rule, Gagauz's official script was Cyrillic, close to the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet.