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TUVAN LANGUAGE
Tuvan (Tuvan: Тыва дыл Tyva dyl), also known as Tuvinian, Tyvan, or Tuvin, is one of the Turkic languages. It is spoken by around 200,000 people in the Republic of Tuva in south-central Siberia. The language borrows a great number of roots from the Mongolian language and more recently from the Russian language. There are small diaspora groups of Tuvans that speak distinct dialects of Tuvan in the People's Republic of China and in Mongolia.
Orthography
The original Tuvan orthography was devised in the early 1930s by a Tuvan Buddhist monk, Lopsan-Chimit, who was later repressed in Stalinist purges. It used mostly Latin-based letters with some special letters to reflect the sounds of Tuvan. A few books, including primers intended to teach adults to read, were printed using this writing system. Lopsan-Chimit's alphabet was supplanted by a Cyrillic-based one, in use to the present day, and he was effectively erased from the history books. In the post-Soviet era, Tuvan and other scholars have taken a renewed interest in the history of Tuvan letters, and in setting the historical record straight.
The current Tuvan alphabet is modified version of the Russian alphabet, with three additional letters: ң (latin "ng" or International Phonetic Alphabet [ŋ]), Өө (latin "ö", IPA [ø]), Үү (latin "ü", IPA [y]). The sequence of the alphabet follows Russian exactly, with ң located after Russian Н, Ө after О, and Ү after У. There is no capital letter version of ң, because it never occurs at the beginning of Tuvan words.
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