Tatar Alphabet

The modern Tatar alphabet was approved in 1939. It is based on the  Cyrillic alphabet  0410–0474 with the addition of four letters from the Yaña imlâ (Ө, Ә, Ү, Һ) and two Cyrillic-like letters (Җ, Ң). In 2012, the State Council of the Republic of Tatarstan passed a law allowing citizens to communicate with government agencies using the Latin or Arabic script.

In ancient times, Turkic peoples used the  Old Turkic runic script  10C00–10C48 . It is not clear whether it naturally evolved from pictographic writing or was modified from the  Imperial Aramaic script  10840–1085F . The first monuments were found near the Siberian rivers Orkhon and Yenisei, so scholars named the Turkic script the Orkhon-Yenisei script.

With the spread of Islam, which began in the 10th century, runes were replaced by the  Arabic script  FE8E–FEF1 . It continued to be used until the 20th century.

In 1929, a so-called “unified Turkic alphabet” called Yaña imlâ was developed based on the Latin script. It was used for a short period, after which the Cyrillic alphabet was introduced in the Tatar ASSR.