Kirghiz

Last Updated: 2019-12-19

Background

Language Family: Turkic / Kipchak / Kyrgyz-Kipchak

• Also spelled Kyrgyz, speakers reside in a multitude of places, including but not limited to Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, China, and Tajikistan.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar
Stops	p b	t d			k ɡ
Affricates			tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	v	s z	ʃ ʒ
Nasals	m	n			ŋ
Trills		r
Approximants		l		j
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

• Vowel length is phonemic (Kirchner 2006, 344).
  
• Long vowels are represented by repeated graphemes in Cyrillic, or macrons (¯) in the Romanized alphabet (Kirchner 2006, 345).

	Front	Back
High	i y	ɯ u
Mid	e ø	o
Low		ɑ
For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are unrounded and those on the right are rounded.

Alphabet

• Although a Roman-based alphabet was introduced following the Soviet era, the Cyrillic-based script is primarily used (Johanson 2009, 611).

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/ɑ/
б	/b/
в	/v/
г	/ɡ/
д	/d/
е	/e/
ё	/jo/
ж	/dʒ/
з	/z/
и	/i/
й	/j/
к	/k/
л	/l/
м	/m/
н	/n/
ң	/ŋ/
о	/o/
ө	/ø/
п	/p/
р	/r/
с	/s/
т	/t/
у	/u/
ү	/y/
ф	/f/	only used in loanwords
х	/χ/
ц	/ts/	only used in loanwords
ч	/tʃ/
ш	/ʃ/
щ	/ʃtʃ/	only used in loanwords
ъ		indicates non-palatalization of the preceding consonant - only used in loanwords
ы	/ɯ/
ь		indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant - only used in loanwords
э	/e/
ю	/ju/
я	/jɑ/

Lenition Rules

• Spirantization occurs with most stops intervocalically (Kirchner 2006, pg. 345).

Misc. Rules

• /k/, /ɡ/, and /l/ are realized as [q], [ɢ], and [ɫ] respectively preceding back vowels (Kirchner 2006, pg. 345).
  
• The Kirghiz language implements vowel harmony (specifically two different types) (Herbert, Poppe, and Sinor 1997, pg. 7).

References

Herbert, Raymond J., Nicholas Poppe, and Denis Sinor. 1997. Kirghiz Manual. [Reprint der Ausg.] Bloomington 1963. The Uralic and Altaic Series. Richmond: Curzon.

Johanson, L. 2009. “Kirghiz.” In Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World, edited by Keith Brown and Sarah Ogilvie, 1. ed, 610–13. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Kirchner, Mark. 2006. “Kirghiz.” In The Turkic Languages, edited by Lars Johanson and Éva Á. Csató, Repr, 344–56. Routledge Language Family Descriptions. London: Routledge.