Kyrgyz is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia. It is the official language of Kyrgyzstan and a significant minority language in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, China and in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan. There is a very high level of mutual intelligibility between Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and Altay. A dialect of Kyrgyz known as Pamiri Kyrgyz is spoken in north-eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Kyrgyz is also spoken by many ethnic Kyrgyz through the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Turkey, parts of northern Pakistan, and Russia.
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, the Uniform Turkic Alphabet, was used. In 1940, Soviet authorities replaced the Latin script with the Cyrillic alphabet 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.
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 two distinct varieties; Northern and Southern Kyrgyz.
Kyrgyz should not be confused with Old Kyrgyz (Yenisei Kyrgyz), which is a member of the South Siberian branch of Turkic languages. The living successor languages of Yenisei Kyrgyz are the Khakas language in the Russian Federation and the Fuyu Kyrgyz language in Northeastern China.
In 925, when the Liao dynasty defeated the Yenisei Kyrgyz and expelled them from the Mongolian steppes, some Ancient Kyrgyz elites settled in Altai and Xinjiang where they mixed with the local Kipchaks, resulting in a language shift.
After the Mongol conquest in 1207 and a series of revolts against the Yuan dynasty, Kyrgyz-speaking tribes started to migrate to Tian Shan, which was already populated by various Turco-Mongol tribes. As Chaghatai Ulus subjects, the Kyrgyz converted to Islam. Persian and Arabic vocabulary loaned to the Kyrgyz language, but to a much lesser extent than Kazakh, Uzbek and Uyghur.
Kyrgyz is divided into two main dialects, Northern and Southern. The Northern dialect has more Mongolian loanwords while the Southern one has more Uzbek ones. Standard Kyrgyz is based on Northern Kyrgyz. There is also a third smaller dialect called Pamiri Kyrgyz.
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 trains its volunteers using a "Left-Right Shift" method when carrying out language training in Kyrgyzstan.
The strict vowel harmony system causes some notable phonotactical restrictions in vowels:
Some notable exceptions include the long rounded vowels (/oÃÂ/ /uÃÂ/ /øÃÂ/ /yÃÂ/), which can appear in suffixes regardless of roundedness of the previous vowels (although still following the front-back row harmony), and back rounded vowels, which unround to A after U, therefore creating the following order of vowels in a word with O in its initial syllable: O â U â A âÂÂ︠I
/x/ only occurs in loanwords.
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 Arabic.
Historically the Old Turkic Script was the first script used to write Kyrgyz.
The Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan use a Cyrillic alphabet, which uses all the Russian letters plus ã, é and ï. In the Xinjiang region of China, an Arabic alphabet is used. Between 1928 and 1940, a Latin alphabet 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, 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.
Kyrgyz follows a subject-object-verb word order, Kyrgyz also has no grammatical gender 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 structures.
Nouns in Kyrgyz take a number of case endings that change based on vowel harmony and the sort of consonant 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 vowelâÂÂi.e. back vowels imply a uvular rendering and front vowels imply a velar renderingâÂÂand the vowel in suffixes is decided based on the preceding vowel in the word.
Kyrgyz has eight personal pronouns:
The declension of the pronouns is outlined in the following chart. Singular pronouns (with the exception of ÃÂø÷, 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 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.
To form complement clauses, 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(dïq) for non-perfective events are the most common. The copula has an irregular relativised form ÃÂúõý(ôøú) which may be used equivalently to forms of the verb ñþû- be (ñþûóþý(ôÃÂú), ñþûþÃÂ). Relativised verb forms may, and often do, take nominal possessive endings as well as case endings.
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: