Distinctive diacritics in the Atil-Turkic epitaphs and in the Yarkand documents

Scribes using the Arabic alphabet for writing Arabic, Persian or early varieties of Turkic used non-obligatory ‘distinctive’ diacritics beside the standard diacritics of the writing systems of their languages. After quoting Onur (2024) on the presence of such diacritics in Arabic, Persian, Khāqānī Turkic and Early Middle Turkic, the author documents their appearance in 13th-14th century epitaphs in Arabic and Atil Turkic, a language closely related to Chuvash, spoken in the Volga-Kama area of Russia, and in 11th-12th century legal documents in Uyghur script discovered in Yarkand, East Turkestan. The distinctive diacritics consist either of dots or of small Arabic letters placed either below or above the line of writing. Keywords: The Arabic writing system, Atil Turkic, Early middle Turkic texts, Yarkand documents