Old Turkic Alphabet Table
| Letter | Unicode name | Transliteration |
|---|---|---|
| 𐰀 | orkhon a | a |
| 𐰃 | orkhon i | i |
| 𐰆 | orkhon o | o |
| 𐰇 | orkhon oe | oe |
| 𐰉 | orkhon ab | ab |
| 𐰋 | orkhon aeb | aeb |
| 𐰍 | orkhon ag | ag |
| 𐰏 | orkhon aeg | aeg |
| 𐰑 | orkhon ad | ad |
| 𐰓 | orkhon aed | aed |
| 𐰔 | orkhon ez | ez |
| 𐰖 | orkhon ay | ay |
| 𐰘 | orkhon aey | aey |
| 𐰚 | orkhon aek | aek |
| 𐰜 | orkhon oek | oek |
| 𐰞 | orkhon al | al |
| 𐰠 | orkhon ael | ael |
| 𐰡 | orkhon elt | elt |
| 𐰢 | orkhon em | em |
| 𐰣 | orkhon an | an |
| 𐰤 | orkhon aen | aen |
| 𐰦 | orkhon ent | ent |
| 𐰨 | orkhon enc | enc |
| 𐰪 | orkhon eny | eny |
| 𐰭 | orkhon eng | eng |
| 𐰯 | orkhon ep | ep |
| 𐰰 | orkhon op | op |
| 𐰱 | orkhon ic | ic |
| 𐰲 | orkhon ec | ec |
| 𐰴 | orkhon aq | aq |
| 𐰶 | orkhon iq | iq |
| 𐰸 | orkhon oq | oq |
| 𐰺 | orkhon ar | ar |
| 𐰼 | orkhon aer | aer |
| 𐰽 | orkhon as | as |
| 𐰾 | orkhon aes | aes |
| 𐰿 | orkhon ash | ash |
| 𐱁 | orkhon esh | esh |
| 𐱃 | orkhon at | at |
| 𐱅 | orkhon aet | aet |
| 𐱇 | orkhon ot | ot |
| 𐱈 | orkhon bash | bash |
Old Turkic runiform - the Orkhon script - is the oldest attested writing system of any Turkic language, cut into stone by the first Turkic khaganates in letters that look like runes because they were made for the same job: straight strokes, knife and chisel, stone and wood. The canonical inscriptions stand in the Orkhon valley of Mongolia, memorializing khans and empires in verse; a distinct variant tradition ran among the Yenisei Kyrgyz (ninth-century inscriptions), and the family has likely cousins in the Talas Valley of Turkestan and even the Old Hungarian alphabet of the tenth century. Words were usually written right to left - and some letters carry separate Orkhon and Yenisei shapes, encoded as distinct characters in Unicode because the two traditions genuinely differed.
For over a thousand years the steppes kept their own records unread: European travelers saw the Orkhon pillars, copied them, and could not parse a single sign. The breakthrough came in 1893, when the Danish philologist Vilhelm Thomsen deciphered the Orkhon inscriptions - one of the celebrated decipherments of the nineteenth century, and the moment the early Turkic world regained its own voice, in its own words, describing its own khans. The script served the Turkic and Uyghur Khaganates for roughly three centuries before other scripts took over; Unicode 5.2 (2009) gave it the Old Turkic block (U+10C00), which this chart reproduces in full for the Orkhon tradition.
How to use
- Read the table as the steppes cut it: forty-two Orkhon letters, each row giving the glyph, its Unicode name (which encodes the scholarly transliteration), and the transliteration itself - a for the vowel a, the consonant letters b through ng, and the front/back vowel pairs that Old Turkic orthography distinguishes. The script is an alphabet, but a steppe-adapted one: some signs double for related sounds, and the front/back vowel harmony of Turkic means pairs of letters trade off inside a word. Right-to-left reading is the norm; a few inscriptions run the other direction as a deliberate display choice.
- To practice, transliterate rather than compose: take a scholarly transcription of an Orkhon inscription line - the Kul Tigin and Bilge Kagan memorial texts are the canonical starting points, available in every Turkic linguistics anthology - and map it back to glyphs with this chart. The exercise teaches the system’s real texture: which letters the inscriptions favor, how the variant shapes of the Yenisei tradition (encoded alongside the Orkhon ones in Unicode) differ, and why a script built for stone prefers twenty-degree angles to curves. Writing direction matters: set your text right-to-left, the way the memorial stones were cut.
- Read the context as much as the code. The inscriptions are not administrative records but public monuments - history, elegy and statecraft in verse, addressed by an elder statesman to the Turkic people - and that genre explains the script’s form: big letters, deep cuts, permanent stone. Compare the letterforms with the runic alphabet (the resemblance that misled early scholars) and with the Mongolian script that later carried steppe writing vertically; both comparisons are on this site. The Yenisei variant rows in the Unicode standard - thirty-one more letters - show a script varying by region and century exactly like a handwriting does.
Frequently asked questions
Who deciphered the Old Turkic script?
Vilhelm Thomsen, the Danish philologist, in 1893 - working from copies of the Orkhon valley inscriptions that had circulated in Europe for decades without yielding to anyone. His reading of the script (announced in Copenhagen, in one of the era’s famous decipherment moments) unlocked the memorial texts of the Turkic khaganates, and it mattered twice over: it gave Turkic studies its oldest written texts, and it demonstrated the decipherment method - identify the language family, find proper names, let the phonetic values fall out - that other scripts’ readers used. A rival decipherment claim by Wilhelm Radloff exists, but Thomsen’s readings proved the durable ones.
Why does it look like runes?
Because both scripts were built for the same workshop: knife, wood, and straight strokes. That functional resemblance fooled early European travelers into calling the Orkhon letters "Turkic runes," and the misnomer stuck for a century. The scripts are unrelated - runic belongs to the Germanic world, Old Turkic to the steppe - but the engineering constraint is identical: curved letters are expensive to carve, so both traditions converge on straight lines and angles. The same logic produces the look of Ogham (this site has its chart too), which is pure tally-stroke engineering.
What do the Orkhon inscriptions say?
The major monuments are public history in verse: the Kul Tigin and Bilge Kagan memorials of the Second Turkic Khaganate address the Turkic people directly - narrating the rise and corruption of the state, praising and warning, giving advice to princes - in a tone modern readers find startlingly personal. Smaller inscriptions include epitaphs, signs of ownership, and brief records. The genre explains the script’s character: these are monuments meant to be read aloud and remembered, not ledgers - which is why the texts are literature and the script stayed monumental.
What are the Orkhon and Yenisei variants?
Two regional traditions of the same script, divergent enough that Unicode encodes many letters in both forms: the Orkhon forms of the Mongolian-steppe khaganates (this chart’s forty-two code points) and the Yenisei forms of the ninth-century Yenisei Kyrgyz inscriptions (thirty-one further variant code points in the standard). The differences are letter-shape variants and inventory details, the way a handwriting varies by region and century. There are also likely cousins beyond both: the Talas Valley inscriptions of Turkestan sit somewhere between, and the Old Hungarian alphabet of the tenth century may descend from the family - a script traveling the steppe for six centuries before settling in Carpathian Hungary.
Is Old Turkic still written or read?
The script is extinct - no community has written Old Turkic runiform for a millennium - but it is very much read: every Turkic-language university program, the inscription corpora, and a living scholarly literature keep it in circulation. Unicode support (this chart’s source, U+10C00) means the stones are now fully typesettable, and revivalist use appears on monuments, logos and coins in the Turkic-speaking world. For a script family comparison, it pairs on this site with the Mongolian script - the vertical script the steppe adopted next - and with the runic alphabet it superficially resembles.