Kyrgyz

Why modern Kyrgyz is not Old Kyrgyz

The Yenisei Kyrgyz of the Mongolian steppes spoke a South Siberian Turkic language, whose living descendants are Khakas and Fuyu Kyrgyz. After the Liao dynasty drove them out in 925, some of their elites settled in Altai and Xinjiang, mixed with local Kipchaks and shifted to a Kipchak language. After the Mongol conquest of 1207, Kyrgyz-speaking tribes moved to the Tian Shan and converted to Islam as subjects of the Chaghatai Ulus. Persian and Arabic words came with the new religion, though far fewer than in Kazakh, Uzbek or Uyghur.

Which dialect became the standard

Standard Kyrgyz rests on the Northern dialect, which has more Mongolian loanwords; the Southern dialect has more from Uzbek. A third, Pamiri Kyrgyz, is spoken in north-eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Other lenders over the centuries include Oirat and Russian.

How vowel harmony limits a word

The first vowel of a word decides the rest. A word whose first syllable has ö can hold only ö and ü, so in later syllables vowels differ only by height. Long rounded vowels in suffixes are an exception. The United States Peace Corps teaches the system to its volunteers as a left-right shift.

What became of the Latin plan

The Cyrillic alphabet uses every Russian letter plus ң, ө and ү. A move to Latin became popular after independence in 1991 but was never carried out, and later proposals favoured an alphabet close to Turkish. In April 2023 the national commission for the state language announced a switch to Latin; the government then said Kyrgyzstan had no plans to replace Cyrillic.