Ingush Alphabet

Ingush (гӀалгӀай мотт, ghalghay mott) has been written in Cyrillic since 1938. Its alphabet uses the Cyrillic letters from А а to Я я and one shape of its own, the stick Ӏ, called the palochka. Its other distinctive sounds are written with a digraph: a base letter followed by ь, ъ, х, а or Ӏ. Each digraph counts as a letter of its own and sorts right after its base: Аь after А, ГӀ after Г, Кх, Къ and КӀ after К, Оа after О, Хь and ХӀ after Х.

The consonant digraphs are ГӀ, Кх, Къ, КӀ, ПӀ, ТӀ, Хь, ХӀ, ЦӀ and ЧӀ, and the palochka Ӏ on its own closes the alphabet as its last letter. The school alphabet also lists vowel combinations such as Аь and Оа; оа is one of the spellings that sets Ingush apart from Chechen on the page. Ё, Щ and Ф occur mostly in Russian borrowings.

Before Cyrillic, Ingush was written in Arabic script, and in 1923 it was given a Latin alphabet. In 1938 that was replaced by Cyrillic, which is what schools, books, the press and signs in Ingushetia use today.

What the Ingush letters Ӏ, ГӀ, Хь, Кх and КӀ write

Ingush shares its throat consonants with Chechen, and the digraphs are how Cyrillic spells them. The palochka alone, Ӏ, represents a sound conventionally transcribed /ʕ/ but realized as a voiced epiglottal plosive [ʡ] or an epiglottalized glottal stop, as in Ӏа (winter). Хь хь is its voiceless partner, the breathy ḥ of Arabic, as in хьо (you), while ХӀ хӀ is a plain h. ГӀ гӀ is a voiced sound at the back of the mouth, close to a French r; it appears twice in the people's own name, ГӀалгӀай.

Кх кх is a q, made further back than k, and Къ къ is the same sound with an ejective pop. КӀ, ПӀ, ТӀ, ЦӀ and ЧӀ are ejectives too: k, p, t, ts and ch said with a sharp burst from a closed throat, as in цӀа (house) and вӀов, the stone battle tower that stands in so many Ingush mountain villages. Drop the Ӏ and you write a different sound, and often a different word.

The vowel digraphs write two more Ingush vowels: Аь аь is a front a, close to the a of English cat, and Оа оа writes a vowel that glides from o towards a. Ingush also distinguishes long and short vowels, which the spelling does not always show, so learners lean on dictionaries and on hearing the words.

How to type the palochka Ӏ and the Ingush letters

The palochka is U+04C0 Ӏ; its small form ӏ is U+04CF. Ingush print usually keeps the tall Ӏ inside lowercase words too (цӀа), so if you need only one, copy Ӏ from this page. The same character serves Chechen, Avar, Dargwa, Lezghian, Kabardian, Adyghe and other Caucasian languages.

A Russian keyboard has every other Ingush letter, because the digraphs are typed as two ordinary keys: Х then ь for Хь, К then х for Кх, О then а for Оа. It has no palochka key, so people writing Ingush online very often type the digit 1 instead (ц1а), or a Latin I. It looks close on screen, but search, sorting and spell-check treat it as a different character, and a dictionary search with 1 will not find a word stored with Ӏ.

Windows: in Microsoft Word type 04C0 and press Alt + X; elsewhere copy it from here. Mac: add the Unicode Hex Input source, hold Option and type 04C0. Linux: Ctrl + Shift + U, then 4c0 and Enter. HTML: Ӏ for Ӏ and ӏ for ӏ. On a phone, save Ӏ as a text replacement so it appears when you type a shortcut.

Where Ingush is spoken

Ingush is the language of the Ingush, who call themselves ГӀалгӀай, and an official language of the Republic of Ingushetia, ГӀалгӀайче, in Russia's North Caucasus, alongside Russian. The 2020 Russian census counted about 333,000 speakers. It is spoken in Nazran, the largest town, in Magas, built from the 1990s as the new capital, in the villages of the plain and the tower-filled mountain gorges to the south, and in the Prigorodny District of neighbouring North Ossetia.

Ingushetia became a republic of its own in 1992, when the Checheno-Ingush republic split in two. In 1944 the whole Ingush people, like the Chechens, were deported to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, and they were allowed back only from 1957; Ingush families still live in Kazakhstan today. Nearly all Ingush speakers also speak Russian, and prices are written in rubles, ₽.

Ingush belongs to the Nakh branch of the Northeast Caucasian languages. Its closest relative is Chechen; the two share most of their grammar and much of their vocabulary, though everyday words and spellings differ enough that speakers notice at once. More distant cousins are Avar, Dargwa and Lezghian in Dagestan. Chechen, Avar and Russian are all written in Cyrillic too, and Ingush is spoken in Russia 🇷🇺.