Turkmen alphabet

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The Turkmen alphabet (Turkmen: Türkmen elipbiýi / Tүркмен элипбийи / تۆرکمن الیپبییی) refers to variants of the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, or Arabic alphabet used for writing of the Turkmen language.

The modified variant of the Latin alphabet currently has an official status in Turkmenistan.

At the start of the 20th century, when Turkmen started to be written, it used the Arabic script, but in Soviet Turkmenistan in 1928, the Latin script was adopted. In 1940, the Russian influence in Soviet Turkmenistan prompted a switch to a Cyrillic alphabet and a Turkmen Cyrillic alphabet (shown below in the table alongside the Latin) was created. When Turkmenistan became independent in 1991, President Saparmurat Niyazov immediately instigated a return to the Latin script. When it was reintroduced in 1993, it was supposed to use some unusual letters, such as the pound (£), dollar ($), yen (¥) and cent signs (¢),^[1] but these were replaced by more conventional letter symbols in 1999.^[2] The political and social forces that have combined to bring about these changes of script, then modifications of the Latin script, have been documented by Victoria Clement (2008).^[3]

Turkmen is still often written with a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet in other countries where the language is spoken and where the Arabic script is dominant (such as Iran and Afghanistan).