Chuvash Alphabet

Chuvash (чӑваш чӗлхи, чӑвашла) is written in Cyrillic. Its 37 letters include four for Chuvash sounds: Ӑ and Ӗ, the vowels with a breve, Ҫ, the s with a hook below, and Ӳ, the u with a double acute.

In Chuvash alphabetical order the letters are: А Ӑ Б В Г Д Е Ё Ӗ Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Ҫ Т У Ӳ Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я. The Chuvash-specific letters are positioned as follows: Ӑ after А, Ҫ after С, Ӳ after У, and Ӗ after Ё.

Б, Г, Д, Ж, З, Ф, Ц, Щ and Ё appear mainly in words borrowed from Russian, such as газета or завод. Native Chuvash words manage with the voiceless letters п, т, к, с, ш, ч, х, which sound softer and voiced between vowels, so the spelling stays simple. Chuvash punctuation follows Russian practice: guillemets « » for quotations, „ “ for quotes inside quotes, a long dash — for dialogue, and № before numbers.

The four Chuvash letters Ӑ Ӗ Ҫ Ӳ and their sounds

Ӑ ӑ and Ӗ ӗ are the reduced vowels, short and weak: ӑ is a back vowel somewhere between a short a and o, ӗ its front partner, a short e. They are everywhere in the language, starting with its own name, чӑваш, and чӗлхи (language). They also steer the stress: a Chuvash word is stressed on its last full vowel, skipping any final syllables with ӑ or ӗ, and if every vowel is reduced the stress falls on the first syllable.

Ҫ ҫ is a soft s, between s and sh, close to Polish ś. It begins some of the commonest words: ҫул (year, and also road), ҫӗр (a hundred, and also earth), Ҫӗнӗ ҫул (New Year). Bashkir uses the same letter for the th of "thin", so the shape is shared but the sound is not.

Ӳ ӳ is the rounded front vowel of German ü or French u, as in пӳрт (house) and кӳлӗ (lake). Chuvash writes it with a double acute, Ӳ; the Mari and Altai alphabets use a different letter, Ӱ with two dots, for the same kind of sound.

How to type Chuvash letters on a keyboard

With a Russian layout, 33 of the 37 letters are already on the keys, and only Ӑ, Ӗ, Ҫ and Ӳ need help. On Linux, the XKB layout "Russian (Chuvash)" puts them on the keyboard. On a phone, add Chuvash if your keyboard app offers it, set up text replacements for the four letters, or copy them from this page.

In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 04D1 ӑ, 04D7 ӗ, 04AB ҫ, 04F3 ӳ, and for capitals 04D0 Ӑ, 04D6 Ӗ, 04AA Ҫ, 04F2 Ӳ. On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input layout, hold Option and type the same four-digit code, or find the letters by name in the Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space). In HTML, write ӑ for ӑ, ӗ for ӗ, ҫ for ҫ and ӳ for ӳ (Ӑ, Ӗ, Ҫ, Ӳ for the capitals). The quotation marks are Alt+0171 « and Alt+0187 » on a Windows number pad.

Watch the look-alikes. For years, before fonts and keyboards had the Cyrillic letters, Chuvash was often typed with Latin stand-ins: Ă ă for Ӑ ӑ, Ĕ ĕ for Ӗ ӗ, Ç ç for Ҫ ҫ and Ÿ ÿ for Ӳ ӳ, and plenty of such text is still online. They look nearly the same, but search engines, spell checkers and sorting treat them as different letters, so a word typed with Latin ç will not be found by someone searching with Cyrillic ҫ. Use the Cyrillic letters from this page, and do not confuse Ӗ (breve) with Ё (two dots): Chuvash has both.

Chuvash: the last Oghur Turkic language

Chuvash is a Turkic language, but it is the only living member of the Oghur branch; Turkish, Tatar, Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and the rest all belong to the other, Common Turkic branch. The two split so long ago that speakers of other Turkic languages cannot understand Chuvash. Where they have z, Chuvash often has r, and where they have sh, Chuvash often has l: thirty is вӑтӑр against Turkish otuz, girl is хӗр against kız, stone is чул against taş, winter is хӗл against kış. The language is thought to descend from that of the Volga Bulgars, whose 13th- and 14th-century tombstones carry Arabic-script inscriptions in a language very close to Chuvash.

The Chuvash alphabet as a school script goes back to Ivan Yakovlev, the teacher and educator who in 1871–72 made a Cyrillic alphabet for Chuvash with its own extra letters and wrote the first primers in it. The alphabet was revised through the 1930s, and Ё was added in 1949, completing today's 37-letter form, with Ӑ, Ӗ, Ҫ and Ӳ among its letters. The best-known work of Chuvash literature, Konstantin Ivanov's 1908 poem Нарспи (Narspi), is printed in it today.

Where Chuvash is spoken

Chuvash is spoken mainly in the Chuvash Republic, or Chuvashia (Чӑваш Ен), on the middle Volga, where it is an official language alongside Russian and the capital Cheboksary is called Шупашкар. Large Chuvash communities also live in neighbouring Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and the Ulyanovsk and Samara regions. The 2021 Russian census counted about 700,000 Chuvash speakers; the 2010 Russian census counted just over a million, and nearly all of them also speak Russian. Prices are written in rubles, with the sign ₽.

Chuvashia has no emoji flag of its own; its yellow flag shows a dark red tree of life under three eight-pointed stars, so people paste 🌳 and ✴️ beside 🇷🇺. For the neighbouring Turkic languages see the Tatar, Bashkir, Kazakh and Kyrgyz collections, for its Finno-Ugric neighbours Mari, Erzya and Moksha, and for 🇷🇺 and the country's emoji see Russia.