The term Common Turkic Alphabet refers to two different systems using the Latin alphabet to write various Turkic languages. The old system was developed in the Soviet Union and used in the 1930s; the current system is an alphabet with 34 letters recognised by the Turkic Council. Its letters are as follows:
The orthographies of Turkic languages are largely phonetic, meaning that the pronunciation of a word can usually be determined from its spelling. This rule excludes recent loanwords such as proper names. The letters representing vowel sounds in Turkic dialects are, in alphabetical order,, and,,,,,,.
Semi-vowels are shown with a breve : Ă, Ĕ, Ĭ, Ŏ, Ŭ.
Some handwritten letters have variant forms. For example: Čč=Jj, Ķķ=Ⱪⱪ, and Ḩḩ=Ⱨⱨ.
The Cyrillic Ѕ, Љ, and Њ may be written as Ӡ, Ԡ, and Ԣ respectively.
ٯ = ق or ڨ.
Ṡ, Ż, and Ṫ are used to represent the front and back variants of the letters S, Z, and T/D respectively. They are commonly found at the beginning of words to indicate all following vowels will be back vowels. If the sounds S, Z, T, or D occur in the middle of a word with exclusively back vowels, they may appear in their "soft" or neutral forms of S, Z, T or D.. Unlike Turkish, Arabic does not have vowel-dependent placement rules for these letters; they appear wherever emphatic consonants occur and can thus be seen in any part of the word. Some examples include Ṡahib, Ṡabun, Huṡuṡ, Ṡabr, etc.
Ḑ is a letter originating as part of the old Romanian alphabet, used to represent the old Romanian and Moldovan sound, the voiced alveolar affricate. It is written as the letter D with a small comma below, and it has both lower-case and the upper-case variants. It is also a part of the Livonian alphabet. The letter corresponds to Cyrillic Dze in the romanisation of Cyrillic Turkic alphabets.
Ḋ is only used for Arabic transcriptions; the emphatic consonant it represents does not exist in Turkic languages. For example: Ramaḋan, Kaḋı, Kaḋa, Ḋarb, Ḋarbe, Arḋ, etc.
The Latin letterË has no relation to the Cyrillic letterЁ. The Latin letter Ë represents the sound sequence and thus corresponds to the Cyrillic letter Є in Ukrainian or Е in Russian.
The Cyrillic Ѕ, Љ and Њ all originate in the Serbian and Macedonian alphabets and represent the same phonemes as in the CTA.
The Uniform Turkic Alphabet was a Latin alphabet used by non-Slavic peoples of the USSR in the 1930s. The alphabet used letters from Jaꞑalif as it was also a part of the uniform alphabet. The uniform alphabet utilised the basic Latin letters excluding "w", as well as some additional letters.
