KYRGYZ LANGUAGE

Kyrgyz or Kirghiz (Кыргыз тили) is a Northwestern Turkic language, and, together with Russian, an official language of Kyrgyzstan. It is most closely related to Kazakh and Altay.

Kyrgyz is spoken by about 3 million people in Kyrgyzstan, China, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkey (Asia), Uzbekistan, Pakistan (Chitral) and Russia. Kyrgyz is written in modified Cyrillic (Kyrgyzstan) and modified Arabic (China) scripts. A Latin script was used between 1928 and 1940 in Kyrgyzstan. After Kyrgyzstan gained independence in 1991, there was a popular idea among some of the Kyrgyz politicians to return Kyrgyz language back to the Latin alphabet, but this plan has never been implemented.

History

In the period after 840 CE, the Kyrgyz joined other Turkic groups in an overall Turkification pattern extending across the Tian Shan into the Tarim River basin, east of present-day Kyrgyzstan's border with China. In this process, which lasted for more than two centuries, the Kyrgyz tribes became mixed with other tribes, thoroughly absorbing Turkic cultural and linguistic characteristics.

The forebears of the present-day Kyrgyz are believed to have been either southern Samoyed or Yeniseyan tribes. Those tribes came into contact with Turkic culture after they conquered the Uygurs and settled the Orkhon area, site of the oldest recorded Turkic language, in the ninth century. If descended from the Samoyed tribes of Siberia, the Kyrgyz would have spoken a language in the Uralic linguistic subfamily when they arrived in Orkhon; if descended from Yeniseyan tribes, they would have descended from a people of the same name who began to move into the area of present-day Kyrgyzstan from the Yenisey River region of central Siberia in the tenth century, after the Kyrgyz conquest of the Uygurs to the east in the preceding century. Ethnographers dispute the Yeniseyan origin, however, because of the very close cultural and linguistic connections between the Kyrgyz and the Kazaks.

In the period of tsarist administration (1876 — 1917), the Kazaks and the Kyrgyz both were called Kyrgyz, with what are now the Kyrgyz subdenominated when necessary as Kara-Kyrgyz (black Kyrgyz). Although the Kyrgyz language has more Mongolian and Altaic elements than does Kazak, the modern forms of the two languages are very similar. As they exist today, both are part of the Nogai group of the Kipchak division of the Turkic languages, which belong to the Uralic-Altaic language family. The modern Kyrgyz language did not have a written form until 1923, at which time an Arabic-based alphabet was used. That was changed to a Latin-based alphabet in 1928 and to a Cyrillic-based one in 1940. In the years immediately following independence, another change of alphabet was discussed, but the issue does not seem to generate the same passions in Kyrgyzstan that it does in other former Soviet republics.

One important difference between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan is that the Kyrgyz people's mastery of their own language is almost universal, whereas the linguistic phase of national identity is not as clear in the much larger area and population of Kazakstan. As in Kazakstan, mastery of the "titular" language among the resident Europeans of Kyrgyzstan is very rare. In the early 1990s, the Akayev government pursued an aggressive policy of introducing Kyrgyz as the official language, forcing the remaining European population to use Kyrgyz in most public situations. Public pressure to enforce this change was sufficiently strong that a Russian member of President Akayev's staff created a public scandal in 1992 by threatening to resign to dramatize the pressure for "Kyrgyzification" of the non-native population. A 1992 law called for the conduct of all public business to be converted fully to Kyrgyz by 1997. But in March 1996, Kyrgyzstan's parliament adopted a resolution making Russian an official language alongside Kyrgyz and marking a reversal of earlier sentiment. Substantial pressure from Russia was a strong factor in this change, which was part of a general rapprochement with Russia urged by Akayev.

Phonology

The system of vowel harmony found in the Kyrgyz language is one of the most regular and strictest found in the Altaic language family. There are eight vowels in the system: four front vowels: i, e, ü, ö and four back vowels /ɨ, a, u, o. Not only do these vowels harmonize with one another in terms of front versus back, they also harmonize in terms of rounded versus unrounded as well. For example, if the first vowel in a word is a front rounded vowel such as ü or ö, then every other vowel in that word must be ü or ö as well since these are the only two front rounded vowels in the language. Also, there are two front unrounded vowels, two back rounded vowels and two unrounded vowels. In addition to this, a word no matter its length can never contain more than two different vowels in it, making this a very strict system of vowel harmony.

Writing system

Main article: Kyrgyz alphabet

The modified Cyrillic alphabet includes these additions:

А Б (В) Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й К Л М Н Ң О Ө П Р С Т У Ү (Ф) Х Ц Ч Ш Щ (Ъ) Ы (Ь) Э Ю Я

See also

Kyrgyz language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Kyrgyz people
• Romanization of Kyrgyz

References

• Library of Congress, Country Studies, Kyrgyzstan
• Comrie, Bernard. 1983. The languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press