Old Uyghur Keyboard — Type Old Uyghur Script Online

The Old Uyghur script is a writing system adapted from the Sogdian alphabet and used to write Old Uyghur and related Turkic languages from about the 9th century until the 17th century. It was the everyday script of the Uyghur kingdoms of the Turfan basin and left a large body of Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian manuscripts, legal documents and letters found along the Silk Road.

In Unicode it is a right-to-left script, but in manuscripts the lines run vertically: top to bottom, with columns advancing from left to right. The Mongolian script, and through it the Manchu script, descend from Old Uyghur.

Most computers have no Old Uyghur keyboard, so this tool gives every character its own Latin key: a types aleph, b beth, g gimel-heth, and so on. The on-screen keyboard prints the key on each character. Press it on a physical keyboard, or tap it on a touch screen.

Digits 1–4 attach a combining dot (above or below, one or two) to the letter you typed last, and | \ : ; insert the four punctuation marks. Other keys, including space and Enter, work as usual.

Old Uyghur has only 18 letters, so one letter often stands for several sounds: aleph is used for a and ä, waw for o, u, ö and ü, kaph for k and q, and taw for t and d. In some manuscripts and editions, dots above or below a letter help tell such values apart — these are the four combining marks in the Unicode block.

Because readings depend on the manuscript and on the editor’s conventions, this tool types characters and does not guess a pronunciation. The reference table below lists the transliteration values commonly given for each letter.

Old Uyghur was added to Unicode in version 14 (2021) as the block U+10F70–10FAF, with the script code Ougr. Text typed here is standard Unicode, so it copies cleanly into documents, spreadsheets, databases and web pages.

If you see empty boxes in another app, that app has no Old Uyghur font. Install an open font such as Noto Serif Old Uyghur, which is licensed under the SIL Open Font License.

Researchers and students of Turkic philology, epigraphers and manuscript editors, digital-humanities projects that transcribe Silk Road texts, teachers preparing course material, and anyone curious about the history of the Uyghur writing tradition.