Kyrgyz teaching materials

Vowel harmony

How to know when to use which vowel

The basic vowel inventory of Kyrgyz

There are eight basic vowels in Kyrgyz. These can be categorised by the position of the tongue in the mouth (high/low, front/back) and the rounding of the lips (rounded, unrounded):

The vowels of Kyrgyz

	front		back
	unrounded	rounded	unrouned	rounded
high	и	ү	ы	у
low	э	ө	а	о

See #Other vowel characters for information about long vowels and letters like я, е, etc.

How to choose the right vowel

/I/ and /A/

Most vowels in Kyrgyz suffixes are either a high vowel (/I/) or a low vowel (/A/) underlying. However, a vowel must be specified for more than height in order to be pronounced/written/etc. E.g., /и/ is high, front, and unrounded; no vowels are simply "high"—every vowel has a specification for backness and roundness too. In Kyrgyz, the backness and roundness of vowels in suffixes come from the previous vowel. This means that /I/ can be any high vowel, depending on what vowel comes before it, whereas /A/ can be any low vowel, depending on what vowel comes before it. Lining this up with the vowel chart above, this means /I/ can be any vowel on the top row, whereas /A/ can be any vowel on the bottom row:

Which vowels /I/ and /A/ can be

		front		back
		unrounded	rounded	unrouned	rounded
high	I	и	ү	ы	у
low	A	э	ө	а	о

How to know whether a suffix has /I/ or /A/

In order to know which vowel is correct in a suffix, you must know whether that vowel is underlyingly high (/I/) or low (/A/). This depends on the suffix. For instance, the locative case suffix is -/DA/, meaning that the vowel could be /а/, /э/, /о/, or /ө/. Keep in mind that /э/ is always written as "е" after consonants, so in this case, the possible forms are "да", "де", "до", and "дө" (and also "та", "те", "то", and "тө").

Likewise, a suffix with /I/—for example the genitive case suffix -/NIн/—will always have a high vowel: either /ы/, /и/, /у/, or /ү/.

How to know which vowel to use

Fifteen out of sixteen times, you can simply choose the high vowel (for /I/) or low vowel (for /A/) that is in the same backness and roundedness columns in the above table(s) as the previous vowel in the word.

For example, the last (and only) vowel in word "көл" ‘lake’ is front and rounded. As can be seen in the table(s), /ү/ is the high front rounded vowel, so would be used for /I/, and /ө/ is the low front rounded vowel, so would be used for /A/. This means that the genitive suffix -/NIн/ would be added to "көл" with /ү/: "көлдүн", and the locative suffix -/DA/ would be added to "көл" with /ө/: "көлдө".

The one exception is when /A/ occurs after /у/. In this case, /а/ is chosen for /A/, not /о/. For example, the word "кул" ‘slave’ takes the expected genitive for "кулдун", but it takes the locative form of "кулдан".

The following chart summarises which vowel to chose for /I/ and /A/ after a given vowel:

	и	ү	э	ө	а	о	ы	у
A	э	ө	э	ө	а	о	а	а
I	и	ү	и	ү	ы	у	ы	у

For example, the column "э - э - и" means that after "э" (or "ээ" or "е"), the correct /A/ vowel is "э" (or "ээ" or "е") and the correct /I/ vowel is "и". The one "exception" to a regular system is highlighted in bold.

Other vowel characters

Long vowels

Long-vowel equivalents of all the vowels (with the exception of и and ы, which may not have true long-vowel equivalents) are written by doubling the vowel symbol:

The vowels of Kyrgyz

	front		back
	unrounded	rounded	unrouned	rounded
high	(ийи)	үү	(ыйы)	уу
low	ээ	өө	аа	оо

These behave with vowel harmony normally.

й vowels

Aside from the vowels, there are 4 vowel "letters" which are contain these sounds:

The й-"vowels" of Kyrgyz

й + э	е
й + а	я
й + о	ё
й + у	ю

This means, for example, that when you write "я" in Kyrgyz, you're just representing /йа/ (a sequence of a consonant followed by a vowel) in a different way. This means that "я" behaves like "а" for purposes of vowel harmony, etc., but that you just have to keep in mind that there's an extra "й" to deal with.

The letter "е"

The letter "е" is special, since it is always used after consonants to stand for the /э/ sound. After vowels and at the beginning of words, "э" is written for the /э/ sound, and "е" stands for /йэ/.