The Uzbek Alphabet: Latin, Cyrillic and the Switch
Why Uzbek signs appear in two alphabets, what the 2026 reform changes, and the handful of Cyrillic letters worth learning before you land.
Walk one block in central Tashkent and you will see the same word written two ways. The pharmacy sign says DORIXONA in Latin letters; the older one three doors down says ДОРИХОНА. The bank ATM offers you Uzbek in Latin, Russian in Cyrillic, and English. Nothing is wrong. Uzbekistan has been switching alphabets for thirty-three years and has not finished.
For a visitor this is a practical problem rather than a political one, and it's solvable in about twenty minutes of preparation.
Why there are two
Uzbek has been written in three scripts in a century. Arabic script until the 1920s, Latin briefly in the late twenties and thirties, then Cyrillic under the Soviet Union from 1940.
In 1993, two years after independence, Uzbekistan passed a law returning to a Latin-based alphabet. The deadline for completing the switch was 2000. It was moved to 2005, then to 2010, and thirty-three years on both scripts are still in daily use.
The split is roughly generational and institutional. Schools switched to Latin, so anyone educated since the late nineties reads it comfortably. Cyrillic persisted in government offices, publishing and much of the media, which means a large part of what gets printed for adults is still in the old script. Plenty of Uzbeks read both without thinking about it.
What's changing in 2026
The alphabet is being revised again, and this time it's moving.
Uzbekistan's Legislative Chamber passed a law on 7 July 2026 replacing the current 26-letter alphabet, with its awkward apostrophe forms and three letter combinations, with 28 letters and a single apostrophe. The Senate approved it on 10 September 2026 and sent it to the president for signature (last checked: September 2026 — see Gazeta.uz for the current status).
Four substitutions do most of the work:
| Now | Becomes | Sound |
|---|---|---|
| Sh sh | Ş ş | sh as in shop |
| Ch ch | Ç ç | ch as in chair |
| Oʻ oʻ | Ö ö | a rounded o |
| Gʻ gʻ | Ğ ğ | a throaty g |
The logic is one sound, one letter — which makes the language far easier to handle in software, sorting and search, and brings Uzbek closer to how Turkish is written. The immediate consequence for travellers is that place names you look up now may be spelled differently on signage in a few years. Toshkent stays Toshkent; Buxoro stays Buxoro; but Shahrisabz may start appearing as Şahrisabz.
Nothing about this happens quickly. Given the record of the last three deadlines, expect both scripts to coexist for a good while yet.
The Cyrillic letters worth knowing
You do not need to learn Cyrillic. You need about twelve letters, because the ones that cause trouble are the ones that look like Latin letters and aren't.
| Letter | Sounds like | Trap |
|---|---|---|
| Р р | r | Looks like P |
| С с | s | Looks like C |
| В в | v | Looks like B |
| Н н | n | Looks like H |
| У у | u | Looks like Y |
| Х х | kh | Looks like X |
| Ж ж | zh / j | No Latin lookalike |
| Ш ш | sh | No Latin lookalike |
| Ч ч | ch | No Latin lookalike |
| Я я | ya | Backwards R |
| Ю ю | yu | — |
| Э э | e | Backwards C-ish |
Learn those and you can decode a metro station name, a bus destination board and a restaurant sign. That is genuinely most of what you need. ОШХОНА is oshxona, an eating house. ДОРИХОНА is a pharmacy. ВОКЗАЛ is a railway station.
Where each script actually turns up
- Metro station names: both, usually. The Tashkent metro has been relabelled in Latin on newer signage, with older Cyrillic still in place on platform walls.
- Street signs and official buildings: mostly Latin now.
- Older shopfronts, markets, handwritten menus: Cyrillic, frequently.
- Russian, wherever it appears: always Cyrillic. Russian never switched, and a lot of what you'll see in Cyrillic is Russian rather than Uzbek.
- Anything typed by a younger person: Latin.
That last distinction is worth grasping. Two Cyrillic signs on the same street may be in two different languages. If the word ends in -хона or -лик it's probably Uzbek; if it's got -ая or -ий it's Russian.
Place names: the spellings that catch people out
The bigger nuisance for travellers is not the script. It is that the same city has an English spelling, an Uzbek Latin spelling and a Russian spelling, and booking sites use all three inconsistently.
Bukhara is Buxoro in Uzbek and Бухара in Russian. Khiva is Xiva. Shakhrisabz is Shahrisabz or Şahrisabz. Termez is Termiz. Fergana is Fargʻona, and the valley turns up as Ferghana, Fergana and Farghona depending on who wrote the page. Nukus and Samarkand are mercifully stable, though Samarkand is Samarqand locally.
Where this bites is rail booking, where the official system uses local spellings and a search for "Bukhara" may return nothing useful. Try the Uzbek form if the English one fails, and check the station name too: trains to Bukhara often terminate at Kagan, several kilometres outside the city.
The practical workaround
Download the Uzbek and Russian offline packs in your translation app before you arrive, and use the camera function. Pointing a phone at a Cyrillic menu and getting a rough translation takes two seconds, works without a signal, and removes ninety per cent of the problem. Our notes on getting a local SIM and data cover connectivity for the rest of it.
For actually speaking to people, the script is irrelevant — what matters is a dozen spoken phrases, and our Uzbek phrase guide has the ones that earn the most goodwill.
One thing to do on the plane
Write out those twelve Cyrillic letters on the back of your boarding pass and test yourself against the in-flight magazine. It takes fifteen minutes and it converts a wall of unreadable signage into something you can mostly parse — which changes how confident you feel walking around on day one more than any other preparation of comparable effort.
For the wider context of why this reform keeps stalling, the Times of Central Asia has a good piece on the debate the latest changes have reopened. And if you're still deciding what else to prepare, our list of first-time mistakes in Uzbekistan covers the rest.
Featured image: Humoyun Mehridinov (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.