Kyrgyz

Where it’s spoken

Kyrgyz is the official state language of Kyrgyzstan and is co-official with Russian. About 5 million people speak it as a first language. Significant Kyrgyz communities live in China (especially in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang), Russia, and Tajikistan, plus a growing diaspora in Russia and Turkey.

What it sounds like

Kyrgyz, like other Turkic languages, has vowel harmony — words must contain either front or back vowels, with the harmony pattern extending across suffixes. It has eight vowels with phonemic length and 22 consonants. Stress falls on the final syllable.

How it’s written

Kyrgyz has used the Arabic script (until 1928), the Latin script (1928–1940), and Cyrillic (since 1940) with 36 letters. The Latin alphabet was reintroduced in some contexts after 1991, but Cyrillic remains the everyday script. Kyrgyz in China uses a modified Arabic script.

History

Kyrgyz is named for the historical Kyrgyz people who feature in early Chinese chronicles. The Manas epic — one of the longest oral epics in world literature with over half a million lines — is recited by Manaschi performers in classical Kyrgyz. Modern literary Kyrgyz developed under Soviet patronage in the 1920s–30s.