Uyghur Script Converter — UEY ↔ ULY ↔ USY

Uyghur is written in three living scripts. UEY, the Arabic-based script, is the standard for print, education and everyday writing in Xinjiang and is the form most Uyghur text online is written in. ULY, the Latin script, is popular for typing on devices without a Uyghur keyboard and for readers who do not know the Arabic script. USY, the Cyrillic script, is used by Uyghur communities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and other former Soviet countries. This converter also outputs the historical Old Uyghur script.

Each script has its own conventions for vowels, digraphs and word boundaries, which is why the same sentence can look very different in each.

Uyghur writes every vowel, and in the Arabic script a vowel at the start of a word (or after another vowel) needs a hemze (ئ) carrier that has no equivalent in Latin or Cyrillic. Several Uyghur sounds are single letters in Arabic and Cyrillic but two letters in Latin — ch, sh, gh, ng and zh — so a converter has to read the text in units, not letter by letter. The Latin script also uses an apostrophe to separate letter pairs that would otherwise read as a digraph.

Yazghuchi’s converter applies these rules in both directions, so a round trip such as UEY → ULY → UEY returns the original text.

Leave auto-detect on unless your text mixes scripts, and proofread names and borrowed words, which can have more than one accepted spelling. After converting to UEY, run the spell checker and punctuation checker to catch keyboard slips. The Old Uyghur output is one-way: that script has only 18 letters, so several modern letters share one glyph and it cannot be converted back reliably — use the Old Uyghur keyboard to type or edit it letter by letter.