Adyghe Alphabet & Letters

Adyghe, which its speakers call адыгабзэ and linguists also call West Circassian, has been written in Cyrillic since 1938. Its alphabet has 33 Cyrillic letters, from А а to Я я, and one more at the end: Ӏ, the palochka. Those 34 characters are everything you need to write the language, and all of them are in the grid above.

Adyghe has far more consonants than Cyrillic has letters, so most of its sounds are written with two or three characters, and the combinations count as letters in their own right. School alphabets and dictionaries list Гу, Гъ, Гъу, Дж, Дз, Дзу, Жъ, Жъу, Жь, Ку, Къ, Къу, КӀ, КӀу, Лъ, ЛӀ, ПӀ, ПӀу, ТӀ, ТӀу, Хъ, Хъу, Хь, Цу, ЦӀ, Чъ, ЧӀ, Шъ, Шъу, ШӀ, ШӀу and Ӏу among the letters, which brings the Adyghe alphabet to more than 60 entries. In the grid each combination is named beside the letter it starts with; you copy it by pasting its parts one after another.

The second and third characters work like accent marks. A following у makes a rounded consonant, said with the lips pushed forward: ку, гу, шъу. A following Ӏ makes an ejective, a consonant released with a sharp pop from a closed throat: кӀ, пӀ, тӀ, цӀ, чӀ, шӀ, лӀ. Ъ and ь move a sound to another place in the mouth: къ, гъ and хъ are made far back at the uvula, хь is a breathy h from deep in the throat, and шъ, жъ and жь are Adyghe hissing and hushing sounds. Ё turns up mainly in words borrowed from Russian.

The palochka Ӏ: the Adyghe letter that is not an I

The palochka (Russian for 'little stick') is the last letter of the Adyghe alphabet. On its own it writes the glottal stop, the catch in the throat between the two halves of English 'uh-oh'; Ӏу is its rounded form. After a consonant it marks the ejective, as in шӀу (good). In Unicode the capital Ӏ is U+04C0 and the small ӏ is U+04CF; the small form was only added in Unicode 5.0 in 2006, so most Adyghe text, printed and online, uses the capital Ӏ everywhere, even inside lowercase words.

Because the palochka is not on a Russian keyboard, people often stand in a Latin capital I, the digit 1, a small l or the Ukrainian letter І. On screen шIу with a Latin I looks almost the same as шӀу with the palochka, but to a computer they are different words: search engines, spell checkers and dictionaries will not match them. Paste the real Ӏ from this page when the text will be searched, sorted or printed.

Adyghe is not the only language with a palochka. The Kabardian alphabet uses it the same way, and so do Chechen, Ingush and Avar, each for its own sounds; their collections show where it sits in their alphabets.

How to type Adyghe letters on a keyboard

Switch on a Russian keyboard layout (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone all include one) and every Adyghe letter except the palochka is a key: шъ is Ш then Ъ, хь is Х then Ь, гъу is Г, Ъ, У. Only Ӏ needs a trick.

In Microsoft Word, type 04C0 and press Alt+X to get Ӏ (04CF for ӏ). On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input layout, hold Option and type 04C0. In HTML write Ӏ for Ӏ and ӏ for ӏ. On a phone, add an Adyghe keyboard if your keyboard app offers one; otherwise keep Russian and set up a text replacement shortcut that turns a short code into Ӏ, or copy it from here. The quotation marks are Alt+0171 « and Alt+0187 » on a Windows number pad, and Option+\ and Option+Shift+\ on a US Mac keyboard.

Adyghe in Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic letters

Before the Soviet period Adyghe was written only now and then, mostly in versions of the Arabic script used by Circassian Muslims. In 1927 the Soviet authorities gave it a Latin alphabet, as they did for many languages of the USSR at the time, and in 1938 switched it to the Cyrillic alphabet still used today. Books, newspapers, school lessons and dictionaries in Adygea all use Cyrillic.

Circassians in Türkiye read Turkish in Latin letters, and several Latin alphabets for Adyghe have been proposed and used there, especially in online writing. None has replaced Cyrillic as the standard, so a learner anywhere is best served by the Cyrillic letters on this page.

Where Adyghe is spoken

Adyghe has an estimated 450,000 speakers, according to CLDR estimates. The largest group, about 330,000, lives in Türkiye 🇹🇷, descendants of the Circassians who were driven from the northwest Caucasus when the Russian conquest ended in 1864. About 120,000 live in Russia 🇷🇺, mostly in the Republic of Adygea, where Adyghe is an official language beside Russian and the capital Maykop is called Мыекъуапэ, and in Krasnodar Krai, including the Shapsugs on the Black Sea coast. Smaller communities live in Jordan, Syria and Israel, where the Circassian villages of Kfar Kama and Rehaniya teach Adyghe in school.

Adyghe's closest relative is Kabardian, or East Circassian; together they are often simply called Circassian, and speakers of both call themselves адыгэ. Abkhaz and Abaza are more distant cousins in the Northwest Caucasian family. In Russia Adyghe speakers also read and write Russian, and in Türkiye Turkish, so the Russian and Turkish collections are useful neighbours. Prices are written with ₽ in Russia and ₺ in Türkiye.

Is there an Adyghe or Circassian flag emoji?

No. The Circassian flag, green with twelve gold stars (an arc of nine over a row of three) above three crossed gold arrows, is the flag of the Republic of Adygea and of Circassians around the world, but it has no emoji. Flag emoji are built from two regional indicator letters standing for an ISO country code, such as 🇹🇷 for TR and 🇷🇺 for RU, and Circassia is not a country in that list. Unicode also has tag sequences for regions inside countries, but only England, Scotland and Wales are on the recommended list, so phones do not draw a flag for Adygea.

Instead people paste a short emoji version: 💚⭐🏹 for green, stars and arrows, sometimes 💚🏹 alone. It goes in social media names and bios, on 21 May, the day Circassians remember the deportations of 1864, often with a candle 🕯️, and in messages about Adyghe music, dance and weddings.