Caucasian Albanian

Caucasian Albanian is a writing system used to write the Caucasian Albanian language. It is a modification of the Latin alphabet and was first used by the Albanian-speaking population of the Caucasus in the early 1920s. The alphabet consists of 33 letters, of which 30 are latin and 3 are cyrillic. There are no upper- or lower-case letters. Each letter has an assigned numeric value. The alphabet was created by Caucasian Albanians who were living in Azerbaijan at the time. It was first used publicly in 1922, in the newspaper Kavkazskiy Albanets. The alphabet underwent several changes in the following years. In 1924, the letter ⟨Ə⟩ was added to represent the vowel [æ]. In 1925, the letters ⟨Ə⟩ and ⟨Ƣ⟩ were swapped, so that ⟨Ƣ⟩ represented the sound [ʤ], and ⟨Ə⟩ represented the sound [æ]. In 1927, the letter ⟨Ɗ⟩ was added to represent the sound [dʒ]. The alphabet has been relatively stable since 1927, though a few changes have been made for political reasons. In 1930, the letter ⟨Ɗ⟩ was removed, as the Soviet Union saw it as representing a bourgeois tendency. In 1932, the letter ⟨Ƣ⟩ was removed, as the Soviet Union saw it as representing a feudal tendency. The alphabet is currently used by the Caucasian Albanian-speaking population of Azerbaijan, as well as by some Albanians in Turkey.