The Altay Alphabet

Altay (Southern Altai) is a South Siberian Turkic language ^[1] co-official in the Altai Republic, Russia. It is spoken by approximately 57,000 people, mainly ethnic Altay living in the mountainous southern Siberian region bordering Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China.

UNESCO classifies Altay as "vulnerable" — the language has active use in local media and education but faces ongoing pressure from Russian. The republic maintains Altay as a co-official language alongside Russian in government and schools.

The Altay Cyrillic alphabet has 3 unique letter pairs ^[2] not found in Russian: Ö/ö (front rounded ö-vowel, like German schön), Ÿ/ÿ (close front rounded ü-vowel, like German über), and Ҥ/ҥ (velar nasal ng-sound, as in "sing").

The two diaeresis vowels (Ö, Ÿ) use two dots as their diacritic — a convention shared with the related Khakas and Shor alphabets, distinguishing the Siberian Turkic orthographic tradition from other Turkic Cyrillic systems.

The Altai Republic is a federal subject of Russia ^[1] located in southern Siberia, at the geographic heart of the Eurasian continent. It borders Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, and the Russian regions of Kemerovo, Novosibirsk, and Altai Krai.

The republic is known for its rugged mountain terrain, including Belukha Mountain — the highest peak in Siberia. The capital is Gorno-Altaysk. Ethnic Altay people make up about 36% of the republic's population, making Altay co-official with Russian.

Altay belongs to the South Siberian branch of Turkic ^[1]. Its closest relatives are Khakas (Republic of Khakassia) and Shor (Kemerovo Oblast). Together these form a distinct subgroup within Siberian Turkic, itself a conservative branch of the Turkic family.

Siberian Turkic languages differ from the better-known Kipchak or Oghuz branches. Tuvan and Tofa are more distantly related Siberian Turkic languages. Altay's position in the south of the family places it between the Siberian and Inner Asian Turkic zones.

UNESCO classifies Altay as "vulnerable" ^[1] — the least severe of UNESCO's endangerment categories. With approximately 57,000 speakers, Altay is still transmitted to children in some communities, but faces competition from Russian in education, media, and urban life.

The Altai Republic government actively supports Altay through school programmes, local television, and cultural institutions. Altay-language publishing and epic poetry (kaï) — recognised by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage — help sustain the language's cultural vitality.

Altay and Russian are unrelated languages ^[2] from completely different families — Altay is Turkic while Russian is Slavic. They share only the Cyrillic script. Altay grammar is agglutinative: grammatical meaning is added by stacking suffixes onto a word root, unlike Russian's inflectional system.

Altay has vowel harmony, verb-final word order (subject-object-verb), and no grammatical gender — all features absent from Russian. Most Altay loanwords from Russian relate to modern technology and administration, while the core vocabulary remains Turkic.

Vowel harmony is a core feature of Altay grammar ^[2] in which all vowels within a word must belong to the same harmonic set. Altay has two sets: front vowels (Е, И, Ö, Ÿ, Э) and back vowels (А, О, У, Ы).

When a suffix is added to an Altay word, its vowel changes to match the vowel class of the root. For example, the plural suffix is -лар after back-vowel roots but -лер after front-vowel roots. This alternation is systematic and applies to all Turkic suffixes in the language.

Altay was first written systematically by Russian Orthodox missionaries ^[2] in the 19th century using adapted Russian Cyrillic. In the 1920s–30s, a Latin-based alphabet was introduced during Soviet Latinisation, then replaced by the current Cyrillic alphabet in 1938.

Before missionary literacy, Altay had no widespread writing tradition. Oral culture — especially the kaï epic tradition — preserved cultural knowledge. The 1938 Cyrillic standardisation added the three unique letters (Ö, Ÿ, Ҥ) to represent sounds absent from Russian, and this system remains official today.

Altay is not directly related ^[1] to Mongolian or Chinese — it is a Turkic language, while Mongolian belongs to the Mongolic family and Chinese to the Sino-Tibetan family. However, Altay contains Mongolian loanwords from centuries of Mongol rule in the Altai region.

Some linguists historically proposed a "Altaic" macro-family linking Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic — but this hypothesis is rejected by most modern linguists. The geographic name "Altai" for the region and the language predates any such theory and reflects the Altai Mountains where the people live.