Buryat Alphabet

Buryat (буряад хэлэн) has been written in Cyrillic since 1939. Before that it was written for a few years in a Latin alphabet, and for centuries in the vertical Classical Mongolian script, which Buryat Buddhist monasteries kept using; in 1905 the scholar Agvan Dorzhiev also designed a reformed version of it, the Vagindra script, for Buryat speech.

In Buryat alphabetical order the letters are: А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й К Л М Н О Ө П Р С Т У Ү Ф Х Һ Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я. Ө, Ү and Һ each follow the letter they look like: Ө after О, Ү after У, Һ after Х. Mongolian Cyrillic has the same letters except Һ.

Letters such as Ф, Ц, Ч, Щ and Ъ appear mostly in words borrowed from Russian, while Э is very common in native words: хэлэн (language), шэнэ (new). Long vowels are written double, as in буряад and сагаан (white). Punctuation uses guillemets « » for quotations, „ “ for quotes inside quotes, a long dash — for dialogue and № before numbers.

Ө, Ү and Һ: the three Buryat letters

Ө ө is a rounded vowel made further forward than о, close to the vowel of German ö, and Ү ү is a rounded vowel made further forward than у, close to German ü. They matter because Buryat, like Mongolian, has vowel harmony: words generally follow a back-vowel (а, о, у) or front-vowel (э, ө, ү) pattern, with и neutral and suffixes harmonizing with the stem, so Улаан-Үдэ, the capital Ulan-Ude, mixes two words of different kinds.

Һ һ is a plain h, and Buryat often writes it where Khalkha Mongolian has s: Buryat һара (moon, month) is Mongolian сар, and һайн (good) is сайн. In the same regular correspondence, Buryat с matches Mongolian ц and Buryat ш matches ч, which is why the White Month festival is Сагаан һара in Buryat and Цагаан сар in Mongolian, and why “you” is ши (Mongolian чи).

How to type Buryat letters on a keyboard

Buryat is often typed on a Russian layout, which has every letter except Ө, Ү and Һ. A Mongolian (Cyrillic) layout, built into Windows and macOS, adds Ө and Ү but still not Һ, so some people fall back on a Latin h. That is why Buryat text online sometimes shows spellings like hайн written with a Latin h: it looks right, but search and spell-checking treat it as a different letter. On a phone, look for Buryat in your keyboard app’s languages, or copy the letters from this page.

In Microsoft Word, type a letter’s code and press Alt+X: 04E8 Ө, 04E9 ө, 04AE Ү, 04AF ү, 04BA Һ, 04BB һ. On a Mac, the Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space) finds them by name: “barred o”, “straight u”, “shha”. In HTML, write ө for ө, ү for ү and һ for һ (capitals Ө, Ү, Һ).

Watch the look-alikes: Cyrillic Һ, not Latin h or H; Cyrillic Ү, not Latin Y or Kazakh Ұ, which has a stroke; Cyrillic Ө, not Latin Ɵ or Greek Θ. They look the same on screen but sort, search and hyphenate differently.

Where Buryat is spoken

Buryat is spoken mainly in Russia: in the Republic of Buryatia on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal (Байгал далай), where it is an official language alongside Russian, and in the Buryat districts of Irkutsk Oblast and Zabaykalsky Krai. Unicode’s CLDR estimates about 320,000 speakers in Russia; smaller Buryat communities also live in northern Mongolia and in Inner Mongolia in China. Nearly all speakers also speak Russian, and prices are written in rubles, with the sign ₽.

Buryat is a Mongolic language, the closest major relative of Mongolian, and the two are partly mutually intelligible once the sound shifts above are known. Its Siberian neighbours, Yakut to the north and Tuvan to the west, are Turkic and write with other extra letters. For their alphabets see the Mongolian, Yakut and Russian collections; for 🇷🇺 and the country’s emoji see Russia.