Yañalif

The New Turkic Alphabet or Yañalif (Tatar: jaꞑa əlifba/yaña älifba → jaꞑalif/yañalif, [jɑŋɑˈlif], Cyrillic: Яңалиф, "new alphabet"), is the first Latin alphabet used during the latinisation in the Soviet Union in the 1930s for the Turkic languages. It replaced the Arabic script-based alphabets like Yaña imlâ used for Tatar in 1928, and was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in 1938–1940. After their respective independence in 1991, several former Soviet states in Central Asia switched back to Latin script, with slight modifications to the original Yañalif.

There are 33 letters in Yañalif, nine of which are vowels. The apostrophe (') is used for the glottal stop (həmzə or hämzä) and is sometimes considered a letter for the purposes of alphabetic sorting. Other characters may also be used in spelling foreign names. The lowercase form of the letter B is ʙ (small caps B), to prevent confusion with Ь ь (I with bowl). Letter No. 33, similar to Zhuang Ƅ, is not currently available as a Latin character in Unicode, but it looks exactly like Cyrillic soft sign (Ь). Capital Ə (schwa) also looks like Russian/Cyrillic Э in some fonts. There is also a digraph in Yañalif (Ьj ьj).