Kyrgyz is a

Turkic language The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic langua ...

of the Kipchak branch spoken in

Central Asia Central Asia is a region of Asia consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The countries as a group are also colloquially referred to as the "-stans" as all have names ending with the Persian language, Pers ...

. Kyrgyz is the official language of

Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyzstan, officially the Kyrgyz Republic, is a landlocked country in Central Asia lying in the Tian Shan and Pamir Mountains, Pamir mountain ranges. Bishkek is the Capital city, capital and List of cities in Kyrgyzstan, largest city. Kyrgyz ...

and a significant minority language in the

Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture is an autonomous prefecture in western Xinjiang, China, bordering Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Its Capital (political), capital is Artush. The prefecture is home to 622,222 people () and covers an area of . Mo ...

Xinjiang Xinjiang,; , SASM/GNC romanization, SASM/GNC: Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Sinkiang, officially the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), is an Autonomous regions of China, autonomous region of the China, People' ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

and in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of

Tajikistan Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan, is a landlocked country in Central Asia. Dushanbe is the capital city, capital and most populous city. Tajikistan borders Afghanistan to the Afghanistan–Tajikistan border, south, Uzbekistan to ...

. There is a very high level of

mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intelli ...

between Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and Altay. A dialect of Kyrgyz known as Pamiri Kyrgyz is spoken in north-eastern

Afghanistan Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the Durand Line, east and south, Iran to the Afghanistan–Iran borde ...

and northern

Pakistan Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the Islam by country# ...

. Kyrgyz is also spoken by many ethnic Kyrgyz through the former

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

Turkey Turkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is a country mainly located in Anatolia in West Asia, with a relatively small part called East Thrace in Southeast Europe. It borders the Black Sea to the north; Georgia (country), Georgia, Armen ...

, parts of northern

, and

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

. Kyrgyz was originally written in Göktürk script, gradually replaced by the Perso-Arabic alphabet (in use until 1928 in the USSR, still in use in China). Between 1928 and 1940, a

Latin-script alphabet A Latin-script alphabet (Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet) is an alphabet that uses Letter (alphabet), letters of the Latin script. The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this gr ...

, the Uniform Turkic Alphabet, was used. In 1940, Soviet authorities replaced the Latin script with the

Cyrillic alphabet The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Easte ...

for all Turkic languages on its territory. When Kyrgyzstan became independent following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, a plan to adopt the Latin alphabet became popular. Although the plan has not been implemented, it remains in occasional discussion.

Classification

Kyrgyz is a Common Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch of the family. It is considered to be an East Kipchak language, forming a subfamily with the Southern Altai language within the greater Kipchak branch. Internally, Kyrgyz has three distinct varieties; Northern and Southern Kyrgyz. Language should not be confused with Old Kyrgyz (

Yenisei Kyrgyz The Yenisei Kyrgyz () were an ancient Turkic people who dwelled along the upper Yenisei River in the southern portion of the Minusinsk Depression from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE. The heart of their homeland was the forested T ...

) language which classified as a member of the South Siberian branch of Turkic languages. The successor of the Yenisei Kyrgyz language today are the Khakas in

Russian Federation Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

and Fuyu Kyrgyz in

Northeastern China Northeast China () is a geographical region of China, consisting officially of three provinces Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang. The heartland of the region is the Northeast China Plain, the largest plain in China with an area of over . The regi ...

History

In 925, when the Liao dynasty defeated the

and expelled them from the Mongolian steppes, some Ancient Kyrgyz elites settled in Altai and Xinjiang where they mixed with the local

Kipchaks The Kipchaks, also spelled Qipchaqs, known as Polovtsians (''Polovtsy'') in Russian annals, were Turkic nomads and then a confederation that existed in the Middle Ages inhabiting parts of the Eurasian Steppe. First mentioned in the eighth cent ...

, resulting in a language shift. After the

Mongol conquest The Mongol invasions and conquests took place during the 13th and 14th centuries, creating history's largest contiguous empire, the Mongol Empire (1206–1368), which by 1260 covered large parts of Eurasia. Historians regard the Mongol devastati ...

in 1207 and a series of revolts against the

Yuan dynasty The Yuan dynasty ( ; zh, c=元朝, p=Yuáncháo), officially the Great Yuan (; Mongolian language, Mongolian: , , literally 'Great Yuan State'), was a Mongol-led imperial dynasty of China and a successor state to the Mongol Empire after Div ...

, Kyrgyz-speaking tribes started to migrate to

Tian Shan The Tian Shan, also known as the Tengri Tagh or Tengir-Too, meaning the "Mountains of God/Heaven", is a large system of mountain ranges in Central Asia. The highest peak is Jengish Chokusu at high and located in Kyrgyzstan. Its lowest point is ...

, which was already populated by various Turco-Mongol tribes. As Chaghatai Ulus subjects, the Kyrgyz converted to

Islam Islam is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran, and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam are called Muslims, who are estimated to number Islam by country, 2 billion worldwide and are the world ...

. Persian and

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

vocabulary loaned to the Kyrgyz language, but to a much lesser extent than Kazakh, Uzbek and Uyghur.

Dialects

Kyrgyz is divided into two main dialects, Northern and Southern. Northern having more Mongolian loanwords and Southern having more Uzbek ones. Standard Kyrgyz is based on Northern Kyrgyz. There is also a third smaller dialect called Pamiri Kyrgyz.

Phonology

appears only in borrowings from Persian or when followed by a front vowel later in the word (regressive assimilation), e.g. 'sloping' instead of . In most dialects, its status as a vowel distinct from is questionable. The United States

Peace Corps The Peace Corps is an Independent agency of the U.S. government, independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to communities in partner countries around the world. It was established in Marc ...

trains its volunteers using a "Left-Right Shift" method when carrying out language training in Kyrgyzstan.

Lexicon

Kyrgyz has spent centuries in contact with numerous other languages, and as such has borrowed extensively from them. These languages include: Uzbek, Oirat, Mongolian, Russian, and

Orthography

Historically the Old Turkic Script was the first script used to write Kyrgyz. The Kyrgyz in

use a

, which uses all the Russian letters plus ң, ө and ү. Though in the

region of China, an

Arabic alphabet The Arabic alphabet, or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is a unicase, unicameral script written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most ...

is used. Between 1928 and 1940, a

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

was used for many minority languages in the USSR, including Kyrgyz. There have been attempts after 1990 to introduce other Latin alphabets which are closer to the

Turkish alphabet The Turkish alphabet () is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which ( Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements o ...

, e.g. the Common Turkic Alphabet. There are political shades to the Cyrillic-Latin debate. In April 2023, Russia suspended dairy exports to Kyrgyzstan after a proposal by the chairman of Kyrgyzstan's National Commission for the State Language and Language Policies, Kanybek Osmonaliev, to change the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin to bring the country in line with other Turkic nations. Osmonaliev was reprimanded by President Sadyr Japarov, who later clarified that Kyrgyzstan had no plans to replace the Cyrillic alphabet.

Morphology and syntax

Kyrgyz follows a subject-object-verb word order, Kyrgyz also has no

grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

with gender being implied through context. Kyrgyz lacks several analytic grammatical features that english has, these include: auxiliary verbs (ex: to have), definite articles (ex: the), indefinite articles (ex: a/an), and modal verbs (ex: should; will), dependent clauses, and subordinating conjugations (ex: that; before; while). Kyrgyz instead replaces these with various synthetic grammatical substutes.

Case

Nouns in Kyrgyz take a number of

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

endings that change based on vowel harmony and the sort of

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

they follow (see the section on phonology). Normally the decision between the velar (, ) and uvular ( and ) pronunciation of and is based on the backness of the following vowel—i.e.

back vowel A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be c ...

s imply a uvular rendering and

front vowel A front vowel is a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages, its defining characteristic being that the highest point of the tongue is positioned approximately as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction th ...

s imply a velar rendering—and the vowel in suffixes is decided based on the preceding vowel in the word. However, with the dative suffix in Kyrgyz, the vowel is decided normally, but the decision between velars and uvulars can be decided based on a contacting consonant, for example банк /bank/ 'bank' + GA yields банкка , not as predicted by the following vowel.

Pronouns

Kyrgyz has eight personal pronouns: The declension of the pronouns is outlined in the following chart. Singular pronouns (with the exception of сиз, which used to be plural) exhibit irregularities, while plural pronouns don't. Irregular forms are highlighted in bold. In addition to the pronouns, there are several more sets of morphemes dealing with person.

Verbs

Verbs are conjugated by analyzing the root verb: 1) determine whether the end letter is a vowel or consonant 2) add appropriate suffix while following vowel-harmony/shift rules.

Subordinate clauses

To form

complement clause In grammar, a complement is a word, phrase, or clause that is necessary to complete the meaning of a given expression. Complements are often also arguments (expressions that help complete the meaning of a predicate). Predicative, subject and ob ...

s, Kyrgyz nominalises verb phrases. For example, "I don't know what I saw" would be: The sentence above is also an excellent example of Kyrgyz vowel harmony; notice that all the vowel sounds are front vowels. Several nominalisation strategies are used depending on the temporal properties of the relativised verb phrase: -GAn(dIK) for general past tense, -AAr for future/potential unrealised events, and -A turgan(dɯq) for non-perfective events are the most common. The copula has an irregular relativised form экен(дик) which may be used equivalently to forms of the verb бол- ''be'' (болгон(дук), болор). Relativised verb forms may, and often do, take nominal possessive endings as well as case endings.

Sample text

Article 1 of the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal D ...

:Kyrgyz edition of Universal Declaration of Human Rights
/ref> ; Cyrillic script: ; Arabic script: ; Latin script: ; IPA transcription: ; English translation: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Notes

References

Bibliography

* * Krippes, Karl A. (1998). ''Kyrgyz: Kyrgyz-English/English-Kyrgyz: Glossary of Terms''. Hippocrene Books, New York. . * Library of Congress, Country Studies, Kyrgyzstan. * Comrie, Bernard. 1983. ''The languages of the Soviet Union''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Beckwith, Christopher I. 1987/1993. "The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia." Princeton: Princeton University Press. * Tchoroev, Tyntchtykbek. 2003. The Kyrgyz.; in: The History of Civilisations of Central Asia, Vol. 5, Development in contrast: from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century /Editors: Ch. Adle and Irfan Habib. Co-editor: Karl M. Baipakov. – UNESCO Publishing. Multiple History Series. Paris. – Chapter 4, p. 109–125. (). * *

External links

Language Policies, Attitudes, and Beliefs in Kyrgyzstan

El-Sozduk – English-Kyrgyz online dictionary, phrasebook, Android app

Ferdinand, S. & Komlósi, F. 2016. Vitality of the Kyrgyz Language in Bishkek
IJORS, 5/2, pp. 210–226.
Kyrgyz language

Root Vowels and Affix Vowels: Height Effects in Kyrgyz Vowel Harmony
*
事前学習補助教材Кыргыз тили （キルギス語）
(Kyrgyz exercises
Archive
-

Japan International Cooperation Agency The Japan International Cooperation Agency (), also known as JICA'','' is a governmental agency that delivers the bulk of Official Development Assistance (ODA) for the government of Japan. It is chartered with assisting economic and social gr ...

The Talking Kyrgyz Phrasebook

– Kyrgyz language resources (in Russian)
Кербен Translit
– Easy Kyrgyz-Cyrillic–Latin converter
Kyrgyz Cyrillic–Arabic–Latin converter

Kyrgyz–Russian–English Dictionary

Kyrgyz Latin Alphabet

Kyrgyz-Turkish Dictionary

Kyrgyz<>Turkish dictionary
(Pamukkale University)
Russian-Kyrgyz Kyrgyz-Russian Dictionary

Kyrgyz – Apertium
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kyrgyz Language Agglutinative languages Vowel-harmony languages Turkic languages Languages of China Languages of Kyrgyzstan Languages of Pakistan Languages of Russia Languages of Kazakhstan Turkic languages of Afghanistan Languages of Uzbekistan Languages of Tajikistan Languages of Turkey Ethnic Kyrgyz people Subject–object–verb languages