The diverse number of scripts found on Xinjiang signs-- Arabic, Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian-- often present a bewildering challenge to Westerners who are used to the Latin alphabet. Here, no one writes English in public places. But Xinjiang's multilingualism can even mislead the locals. For example, this restaurant, located in downtown Urumqi, advertises "Pancakes, Hamburgers, Porridge" in Chinese characters. Unfortunately, the Uyghur "translation" written above that is: ngngoongngkngngnglng.
Haha, I saw this post a while ago but I didn't think about this until recently. The gibberish characters in the most commonly used keyboard format for Uyghur in Xinjiang correspond to I, O, K, and L on the standard qwerty keyboard. You can see that they're grouped together. So it really was just someone mashing a few fingers down on the same place in the keyboard a la asdf jkl;.Hah.