Chechen has a short but varied history of writing. When the Chechens converted to Islam beginning in the sixteenth century, the presence of educated mullahs meant widespread, though indirect, access to writing, and many families had their clan histories put into writing, usually in Arabic but also occasionally in Chechen using the Arabic script. Apparently no spelling system in Arabic was ever systematized for Chechen, though little is known about this writing because most of these documents were destroyed by the Soviet authorities in 1944. A Latin spelling system was devised for Chechen in the 1920's (based on the unified Ingush-Chechen spelling system created by Zaurbek Malsagov) and used for publication until it was officially replaced by a Cyrillic transliteration of it in 1938. The Latin system used a number of special symbols and diacritics and failed to distinguish vowel length; the Cyrillic system which replaced it lost some more vowel distinctions. It is economical in its use of Russian letters, but at a cost in accuracy and functionality. It uses the numeral "1" as a letter. It does not write every sound: it usually does not write the glottal stop with a letter, and often writes /j/ as part of a vowel letter, though these are ordinary consonants of Chechen and should always be written with separate and overt symbols. In the mid 1990's there was a move to return to Latin spelling, and a special Latin alphabet was proposed for Chechen. This alphabet was a mechanical transliteration of the Cyrillic spelling into a Latin system based on Turkish and Azeri spelling but with a number of special diacritics.
Only the Cyrillic spelling system is widely known to Chechens, as it was taught and used for publication in Chechnya from 1938 to 1944 and 1956 on. The Chechen diaspora in Jordan, Turkey, and Syria is fluent but generally not literate in Chechen except for individuals who have made efforts to learn the writing system, and of course the Cyrillic alphabet is not generally known in these countries.
The Chechen language has (like most indigenous languages of the Caucasus) a large number of consonants: about 31 (depending on the dialect and the analysis), more than for most languages of Europe. Unlike most other languages of the Caucasus, it also has an extensive inventory of vowels and diphthongs: about 27 (depending on dialect and analysis), similar in number and phonetics to the vowel systems of the Scandinavian languages, German, and Finnish. None of the spelling systems used for Chechen so far has distinguished the vowels at all accurately. The materials on this website use an all-Latin, no-diacritics spelling system worked out by the UC Berkeley Chechen-Ingush project. It spells Chechen approximately phonemically, uses letter combinations that are mostly familiar from other languages that use the Latin alphabet, and because it uses no diacritics or special symbols it can be typed rapidly and accurately and used in email, on the internet, and in all computer applications regardless of platform or age. It can also be autoconverted to Cyrillic with great accuracy.
The basic principles of this Latin system are:
Long vowels are written with double letters: aa, ee, oo, etc.
The consonant letter combinations sh, ch, etc. are as in English.
The "ts" consonant is written c (as in Hungarian, Polish, Czech, etc.).
Pharyngeals and pharyngealization are written with w.
The glottal stop and glottalized (ejective) consonants are written with an apostrophe.
The Latin system is illustrated in the following alphabetic tables:
Chechen alphabet: Cyrillic
Latin transcription used here
Chechen alphabet: Latin transliteration of Cyrillic recently proposed
and sound charts:
The Chechen sound system, in phonetic transcription
The Chechen sound system, in the current Cyrillic orthography
The Chechen sound system, in the Latin transcription used here
and word lists:
Words illustrating each Chechen consonant sound
Words illustrating each Chechen vowel sound
