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:

The vowels of Kyrgyz

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

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

е

я

ё

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