Tashkent, 21 October. Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed a law on a new version of the Uzbek alphabet in Latin script on Uzbek Language Day: instead of the letter combinations Sh, Ch, Oʻ and Gʻ it introduces the separate letters Ş, Ç, Ö and Ğ, and the law itself will take effect in six months, on 22 April 2027.
The updated alphabet has 28 letters and an apostrophe instead of the previous 26 letters and three letter combinations; the combination Ng has been dropped as a separate unit. The signing was announced by the head of the Presidential Administration, Saida Mirziyoyeva. "A long-standing historical mistake has finally been corrected… This issue caused disputes for many years, and there was no end in sight," she wrote on her Telegram channel, recalling that she had proposed revising the alphabet on 11 December 2023 at a conference on the legacy of the Jadids — enlightenment reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The transition has been designed to keep costs to a minimum. Documents, national currency and securities issued before the law takes effect with letters of the current alphabet remain valid. Symbols of state bodies, relief images of the state emblem on buildings, signs and signposts with names of geographical features may be used until they wear out or until a deadline set by a government programme of measures, which the government must adopt within two months. "Will all documents now have to be changed? Not at all. We have chosen the path of minimising costs," Saida Mirziyoyeva explained.
The Senate of the Oliy Majlis approved the changes concerning the four letters in early September.
What it means: Uzbekistan is bringing back to its Latin alphabet the letters with diacritical marks it abandoned in 1995; the transition will be gradual, without a mass replacement of documents and money.
Who benefits: According to Saida Mirziyoyeva, the updated alphabet should remove shortcomings of Uzbek writing and strengthen the language's position in the digital space, while the cost of the transition is being kept to a minimum. She also acknowledged: "Of course, change never comes easily, and it is entirely natural that it may provoke objections or concerns."
Background: The Latin alphabet was introduced in Uzbekistan in 1993: it had 33 letters and an apostrophe, including the diacritic characters Ş, Ç, Õ, Ğ, Ĵ and Ń, as well as the letter C for the sound "ts". In 1995 the diacritics were replaced with the combinations Sh, Ch, Oʻ, Gʻ and Ng, and the letter C was dropped. The full switch from Cyrillic was meant to be completed by 2000, but both alphabets are still in use; a 2020 presidential decree on developing the Uzbek language again set the goal of completing the switch to Latin script. In Kazakhstan its own Latin alphabet has not yet been approved: in September the government said that the draft alphabet and spelling rules were still being refined and there was no specific deadline for a full transition; a phased transition had earlier been planned for 2023–2031.
List of sources used: Gazeta.uz, Economist.kg, Tengrinews
Artificial intelligence was used in preparing this material.
