This webpage initially started as a project in the class of Maxim Grouchevoi who has besides his experiences as a lecturer at Freie University Berlin a lot of working experience in areas e.g. Knowledge Management, Digital Media & Educational Technology and Collaborative IT solutions. 

Project ROK – Improving the Turkic alphabets

Since I am studying History & Culture of the Near East there are a lot of writing systems I needed to learn. Especially in my focus area Central Asia there were a lot of mixed systems. Luckily as a Turcologist I had a lot of opportunities to study those languages in detail. My emphasis were always those languages and their alphabets. What I came to realize was as a person with linguistical and informatical background that it is the perfect time to reform those alphabets.

After my first project has gone online I met a lot of native speakers of Central Asian languages: exchange students, docents and students in their homeland. (For example Azerbaijanians from Iran, Kazakh, Uzbek, Uyghur, Tuvan, Turkish, Yakut people) We discussed this idea and I noted everything what they have told me in order to improve the idea of reforming all alphabets.

Ultimately in Azerbaijan (this time the Republic) I met Ülvi Nusal at this time an IT Master student, he agreed to help me with my project. Besides discussing with me the odds of Azerbaijanian, he helped me with the informatics and getting this website online with an enhanced version of the project called ROK.

Click here to see my reformed versions of each language’s keyboard layout and their alphabets. Click here to see a short text/letter comparison of the reformed alphabets versus the old ones. Links for further reading: Advantages of ROK (info presentation), Alphabets, Converters, Turcology & Publications.

For the Ottoman transliteration keyboard layout on macOS named LOCO! click here.