Kyrgyz alphabets

The Kyrgyz alphabets^[a] are the alphabets used to write the Kyrgyz language. Kyrgyz uses the following alphabets:

• The Cyrillic script is officially used in the Kyrgyz Republic (Kyrgyzstan)
• The Arabic script is officially used in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the People's Republic of China (China) in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
• Kyrgyz Braille

The Arabic script was traditionally used to write Kyrgyz before the introduction of the first Latin-based alphabets in 1927. In the years 1923 to 1925, Kyrgyz literaturists and liguists such as Kasym Tynystanov and Ishenali Arabayev undertook a project of reforming Kyrgyz Arabic orthography. In doing so, they took inspiration from the reformed Kazakh Arabic alphabet, one of the first Turkic Arabic scripts to be undergoing reforms as early as 1912. Today an Arabic alphabet is used in China, which slightly differs from the 1920s Soviet standard. For example, in the 1920s Arabic alphabet, the distinction between front and back vowel pairs [о][ɵ] and [u][ʏ] was to be marked with an initial hamza if it couldn't be inferred from the word itself. In the Chinese variant standardized in 1950s, each of the said four vowels have a unique letter for example, thus making the use of a hamza unnecessary.^[1][2]

The New Turkic Alphabet was used in the USSR in the 1930s until its replacement by a Cyrillic script.^[3] The Kyrgyz Cyrillic alphabet is the alphabet used in Kyrgyzstan. It contains 36 letters: 33 from the Russian alphabet with 3 additional letters for sounds of the Kyrgyz language: Ң, Ү, Ө.

Within the country, there have been mixed reactions to the idea of adopting the Latin alphabet for Kyrgyz. The chairman of Kyrgyzstan's National Commission for the State Language and Language Policies, Kanybek Osmonaliev, announced in September 2022 that it is considering switching to the Latin alphabet.^[4] However, several months later, Russia suspended dairy exports to Kyrgyzstan after Osmonaliev repeated his proposal to change the official script from Cyrillic to Latin to bring the country in line with other Turkic-speaking nations. Osmonaliev was reprimanded by President Sadyr Japarov who then clarified that Kyrgyzstan had no plans to replace the Cyrillic alphabet.^[5]

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