Karachay-Balkar Alphabet

Karachay-Balkar (къарачай-малкъар тил) is a Turkic language of the North Caucasus, the mother tongue of two peoples who speak it with only small differences: the Karachays and the Balkars. Since the late 1930s it has been written in Cyrillic. The Karachay-Cherkessia variant uses the Cyrillic letters from А а to Я я and the digraphs Гъ, Дж, Къ and Нъ; Kabardino-Balkaria uses Ж and Нг for two of those sounds.

Alphabet tables also list Ў ў, the short u that Belarusian Cyrillic also uses, after У. It writes a w sound; many books, newspapers and websites simply write у in its place, so you will see both. The letters Ф, Ц and Щ turn up mostly in loanwords, chiefly from Russian.

Before Cyrillic the language was written in Arabic script, and in the 1920s and 1930s in a Latin alphabet, like most Turkic languages of the Soviet Union. The Cyrillic alphabet is what schools, the press and signs in Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria use today.

What Гъ, Къ, Нг, Дж and the vowels Ё Ю write

Къ къ is a deep k said at the uvula, the q of Turkic languages; you see it twice in the people's own names, Къарачай and Малкъар (Balkaria). Гъ гъ is its voiced partner, a soft throaty sound close to a French r. In the Kabardino-Balkaria spelling, Нг нг is the ng of English sing; Karachay-Cherkessia writes Нъ нъ for that sound. Минги тау, a Karachay-Balkar name for Mount Elbrus, uses the Нг spelling. In Karachay-Cherkessia, Дж дж represents the j of English jam; Kabardino-Balkaria writes Ж ж for its local pronunciation.

Like other Turkic languages, Karachay-Balkar has vowel harmony and the front rounded vowels ö and ü, as in Turkish. It writes them with ё and ю after a consonant: кёл (lake) and кюн (day, sun) are read köl and kün, not kyol and kyun as in Russian.

The two main dialect groups differ in a few sounds that show in writing: where the Karachay and Baksan-Chegem speech has ч and дж, the Malkar (Balkar) dialect has ц and з. The literary standard follows the first group.

How to type Karachay-Balkar letters

Everything except Ў is on an ordinary Russian keyboard: the digraphs are typed as two keys, Г + Ъ for гъ, К + Ъ for къ, Н + Г for нг, Д + Ж for дж. On a phone, a Russian keyboard does the same; long-press Е for Ё and Ь for Ъ on most layouts.

Ў ў is U+040E and U+045E. The Belarusian keyboard layout has ў on the key where Russian has Щ, which is the easiest way to type it. Windows: in Word type 040E or 045E and press Alt + X. Mac: add the Unicode Hex Input source, hold Option and type 045E. Linux: Ctrl + Shift + U, then 45e and Enter. HTML: Ў and ў. Or copy it from this page.

Quotation marks follow Russian practice: « » first, with „ “ for quotes inside quotes. Keep the Cyrillic letters Cyrillic: a Latin a, o or c looks the same on screen but breaks searches and spell-checking.

Where Karachay-Balkar is spoken

CLDR estimates about 240,000 speakers, all counted in Russia; Russian census figures are somewhat higher. Karachays live mainly in Karachay-Cherkessia, around the towns of Karachayevsk and Teberda and the upper Kuban valley; Balkars live in the high valleys of Kabardino-Balkaria, south of Nalchik in the Baksan, Chegem and Cherek gorges. Both lands lie under Elbrus, Europe's highest mountain. Smaller communities live in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey.

In 1943 and 1944 the Karachays and Balkars were deported by the Soviet state to Central Asia; they were allowed to return in 1957. The language came back with them and is taught in schools of both republics, where it is an official language alongside Russian. Nearly all speakers also speak Russian, and prices are in rubles, ₽.

Its closest relative is Kumyk, spoken in neighbouring Dagestan, and it is close to Crimean Tatar and more distantly to Tatar, Bashkir, Kazakh and Turkish. The Caucasian neighbours Kabardian, Adyghe, Ossetic and Chechen have their own collections, as do Russian and Russia 🇷🇺.