During its existence, the character set or alphabet of the Dungan language has changed its graphic base several times and has been repeatedly reformed. Currently, the Dungan script functions in Cyrillic. Three stages are distinguished in the history of the Dungan script:pre-1927 – written completely in Chinese characters; 1927-1928 – attempts to create a writing system based on the Arabic script system Xiao'erjing, developed in China by the Hui Muslims; 1928-1953 – writing based on the Latin alphabet; since 1953 – writing based on the Cyrillic alphabet.