Kyrgyz

Introduction

Kyrgyz (also known as Kirgiz) is a member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. The earliest reference to the Kyrgyz people, who were living in the Upper Yenisey region in north-central Mongolia, is found in an Orkhon inscription dating to the 9th century and discovered in an 1889 expedition to the Orkhon Valley Kyrgyzstan monuments in Mongolia.

The spread of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century caused the Kyrgyz people to migrate south and settle in the area of present day Kyrgyzstan. Numerous Turkic and Mongol invasions forced some Kyrgyz to migrate to Turkestan. By the mid-18th century, the Kyrgyz were nominally under Chinese control. After Kyrgyzia was forcibly incorporated into the Russian Empire, some Kyrgyz speakers migrated to Afghanistan. In 1936, Kyrgyzia became a Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990, Kyrgyzstan became an independent Republic of Kyrgyzstan.

Today, Kyrgyz is spoken by 2.5 million people in the Republic of Kyrgyzstan where it is the national language. It is also spoken in Afghanistan, China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. The worldwide population of Kyrgyz speakers is estimated at 3.1 million (Ethnologue).

After gaining its independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, Kyrgyzstan attempted to pursue a policy of de-russification. The policy has not been fully carried out, however, today, instruction in Kyrgyz is available through the secondary-school level. Kyrgyz is also used as a medium of instruction in some courses at the Kyrgyz National University.

Kyrgyzstan Kyrgyz was not standardized until the Soviet period, when it was used along with Russian for official and governmental purposes. Under the Soviet regime, literacy rates in Kyrgyz rose sharply from under 5% in the 1920's to almost universal literacy in the 1970's. At the same time, the percentage of Kyrgyz speakers in the Kyrgyz republic dropped considerably due to the influx of settlers from other parts of the USSR, mostly Russians. There was no Kyrgyz press prior to 1917, but by the mid 1980s, Kyrgyz publications flourished with numerous newspapers, magazines and books, in addition to radio and television.

Dialects

Kyrgyz is usually divided into two dialect groups:

Northern dialects that have a significant number of loanwords from Kazakh and adjacent Mongolian languages.
Southern dialects that are influenced by Uzbek, Tajik, and Persian.

Standard Kyrgyz is based on the Northern dialect.

Structure

Sound System

Kyrgyzstan Boy

Kyrgyz Woman

Kyrgyz Man

Kyrgyz Woman

Vowels
Kyrgyz has eight vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. The vowel system of Kyrgyz is very symmetrical and can be described in terms of the presence or absence of three features: +/- high, +/- back, +/- round.

	Front		Back
	Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
High	/i/	/ü/	/i/	/u/
Low	/e/	/ö/	/a/	/o/

As all other Turkic languages, Kyrgyz is characterized by vowel harmony, a type of phonological process that involves constraints on which vowels may be found near each other. Vowels in Kyrgyz words must harmonize with one another in terms of front versus back, and rounded versus unrounded. For example, if the first vowel in a word is a front rounded vowel such as /ü/ or /ö/, then all other vowels in that word must also be /ü/ or /ö/ l since these are the only two front rounded vowels in Kyrgyz.

Consonants
Kyrgyz has 19 consonant phonemes, i.e., sounds that serve to distinguish word meaning. There are no consonant clusters at the beginning or at the end of words. Voiced obstruents are devoiced at the end of words, e.g., kitebi 'book' (accusative case) becomes kitep 'book' (nominative case).

xx	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Alveo - Dental	Post-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular
Stops	p - b	x	t - d	x	xxxx	k - g	x
Fricatives	x	f	s - z	-	xxx	x	x
Affricates	xx	xx	xx	t	xxx	xx	x
Nasals	m	xx	n	xxx	xx		x
Flap	xx	xx	r	xxx	xxx	x	x
Lateral approximant	xx	xx	l	x	xxx	x	x
Palatal approximant	zx	zx	zx	zx	j		x

x	no equivalent in English
	sh as in shop
	s as in measure
t	ch as in chap
	ng as in song
j	no equivalent in English

Stress
Stress normally falls on the last syllable in Kyrgyz words.

Click here to listen to Kyrgyz music "Shüüdüngüt's Road".

Grammar

Kyrgyz People

Kyrgyz Man

Kyrgyz Boy

Like all Turkic languages, Kyrgyz is agglutinative, i.e., grammatical relations are indicated by the addition of suffixes to stems. There are no prefixes. There is a one-to-one relationship between suffixes and their meanings, so that suffixes are strung together one after another, sometimes resulting in long words. There are various rules for the ordering of suffixes. Kyrgyz uses postpositions rather than prepositions to signal grammatical relationships.

Noun phrase

Kyrgyz nouns are marked for number (singular and plural).
There is no grammatical gender.
There are seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, ablative. Cases are marked by inflectional suffixes and governed by verbs and postpositions.
There are no articles.

Verb phrase
Verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. Verbs have the following grammatical categories:

two numbers: singular and plural;
three persons: 1st, 2, 3rd;
five moods: indicative, dubitative, imperative, conditional, subjunctive;
two voices: active and passive;
three tenses: present, past, future;
evidentiality: Kyrgyz contrasts direct information (reported directly) and indirect information (reported indirectly).

Word order
Word order in Kyrgyz sentences is normally Subject-Object -Verb. However, other orders are possible, depending on discourse-oriented considerations such as emphasis.

Vocabulary

Kyrgyz Man

Kyrgyz Girl

Kyrgyz lexicon is basically Turkic with borrowings from Arabic, Persian, and Russian. There is also some international vocabulary which came into Kyrgyz mostly by way of Russian.

Kyrgyz Man Below are a few words and phrases in Kyrgyz.

Salam, salamsatysby	Hi, hello
Raxmat.	Thank you
Ooba	Yes
Jok	No
Adam	Man
Ayal	Woman

Below are the numerals 1-10 in Kyrgyz.

Writing

Kyrgyz Man

Kyrgyz

Kyrgyz has been written in several different scripts.

Until 1923 an Arabic script was used.
In 1924, the Arabic script was modified after the language was standardized.
In 1936, a modified Cyrillic alphabet was introduced. It is still in use today.
Attempts have been made recently to replace Cyrillic with a Latin-based orthography.

Modified Cyrillic-based alphabet for Kyrgyz

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Kyrgyz.

UDHR Kyrgyz

Resources

Click here to find out where Kyrgyz is taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Kyrgyz.

Online resources for the study of Kyrgyz
Peace Corps Kyrgyz Language Manual
SEELRC Kyrgyz Webliography
Omniglot guide to Kyrgyz alphabet
Wikipedia article on Kyrgyz language
Orientaal's Kyrgyz links
UCLA language profile for Kyrgyz
Ethnologue report on Kyrgyz
Radio Free Europe - Kyrgyz