The Shor Alphabet

Shor is a Siberian Turkic language ^[1] spoken by the Mountain Shoreans (Шорцы) of Kemerovo Oblast (Kuzbass), southwestern Siberia, Russia. The Shor people traditionally inhabited the mountainous valleys of the Mrasu, Kondoma, and Tom rivers — a region known as Mountain Shoria — where they practiced hunting, fishing, and iron-smelting.

Today approximately 2,000–3,000 active speakers remain, mostly elderly. UNESCO classifies Shor as severely endangered. Soviet-era industrialisation brought massive Russian-speaking populations into the Kuzbass coal-mining region, dramatically accelerating language shift among the Shor people.

The Shor Cyrillic alphabet extends Russian Cyrillic with 3 unique letters ^[2]: Ö (front rounded ö), Ÿ (front rounded ü), and Ң (velar nasal ng). These additions bring the Shor alphabet to approximately 36 letters total.

These three letters encode sounds fundamental to Turkic phonology that are absent from Russian. The front-rounded vowels Ö and Ÿ are characteristic of the Turkic vowel harmony system, while Ң encodes the ng-sound that appears in word-initial position in Siberian Turkic languages.

Shor belongs to the Sayan Turkic subgroup ^[1] of the Siberian Turkic branch of the Turkic language family. Its closest relatives are Tuvan (Tyvan), Khakas, Altay, and Tofalar — all Turkic languages of the Sayan-Altai mountain region.

Shor is more distantly related to Turkish, Uzbek, Kazakh, and other Turkic languages. All Turkic languages share vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, and verb-final word order (SOV) inherited from their common Old Turkic ancestor.

Yes — Shor and Tuvan are closely related Siberian Turkic languages ^[2], both belonging to the Sayan Turkic subgroup. They share many cognate words, similar vowel systems (both have the Ö and Ü/Ÿ front-rounded vowels and the Ң nasal), and comparable grammatical structures.

However, Shor and Tuvan are not mutually intelligible — centuries of separate development in different river valleys produced significant phonological and lexical differences. Tuvan has approximately 280,000 speakers and official status in the Tyva Republic, while Shor is far more endangered with only a few thousand active speakers remaining.

Mountain Shoria is the traditional homeland of the Shor people ^[1], a mountainous region in the south of modern Kemerovo Oblast where the Mrasu, Kondoma, and Tom rivers flow through the northern spurs of the Altai-Sayan mountain system. The region takes its name from the Shor people, who were renowned historically as skilled iron-smelters — the name "Shor" may relate to this metallurgical tradition.

Today part of Mountain Shoria is protected as the Shorsky National Park, established in 1989. The park preserves the taiga landscape of the Shor homeland, though the broader Kemerovo Oblast remains one of Russia's main coal-producing regions, and the Shor community faces ongoing challenges of cultural preservation.

Before the current Cyrillic script, Shor used a Latin-based alphabet developed in the 1920s ^[2] as part of Soviet language planning for minority peoples. Before that, there was a brief use of a Cyrillic-based missionary script developed in the 19th century by Russian Orthodox missionaries for religious texts.

The current Shor Cyrillic alphabet was introduced in the Soviet period. Today Shor is used in limited publications, educational materials, and cultural activities, but its use is largely confined to elderly speakers and dedicated cultural preservation efforts in Kemerovo Oblast.

Shor is classified as severely endangered by UNESCO ^[1] — one of the most critical threat levels for a living language. Only approximately 2,000–3,000 people actively speak Shor, most of them elderly. Younger generations in the Kuzbass region have largely shifted to Russian as their primary language.

Several revitalisation efforts exist: the Shor language is taught in some schools in Mountain Shoria, and cultural organisations work to document and promote the language. However, without a significant reversal in intergenerational transmission, linguists regard Shor as at high risk of extinction within the coming decades.

The Shor alphabet has 3 letters not found in Russian Cyrillic ^[2]: Ö/ö (front rounded ö-sound, as in German schön), Ÿ/ÿ (front rounded ü-sound, as in German über), and Ң/ң (velar nasal ng-sound, as in English "sing").

These three additions are fundamental to Turkic phonology. The front-rounded vowels Ö and Ÿ participate in Shor's vowel harmony system, while Ң can appear at the beginning of words in Shor — a position where most Oghuz Turkic languages (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen) replaced this sound with /y/ or dropped it entirely thousands of years ago.