Kumyk Alphabet

Kumyk (къумукъ тил, qumuq til) has been written in Cyrillic since 1938. Its alphabet has 39 letters: the Cyrillic letters А а to Я я, and six digraphs that write Kumyk's own sounds, each a base letter followed by ъ, ь or another letter: Гъ, Гь, Къ, Нг, Оь and Уь. Each counts as a letter of its own and sorts right after its base: Гъ and Гь after Г, Къ after К, Нг after Н, Оь after О, Уь after У.

Because every Kumyk letter is built from ordinary Cyrillic characters, Unicode has no separate code points for them, and none are needed: Къ is simply К followed by ъ. That makes Kumyk one of the easiest languages of the Caucasus to type, since any Russian keyboard already has everything. Letters such as Ф, Ц and Щ turn up mainly in words borrowed from Russian.

Before Cyrillic, Kumyk was written for centuries in Arabic script, and from the late 1920s until 1938 in a Latin alphabet. Cyrillic is the standard today in schools, books, the theatre and the press, including the Kumyk newspaper Ёлдаш (Yoldash).

What Къ, Гъ, Гь, Нг, Оь and Уь write

Kumyk is a Turkic language, and its digraphs cover the sounds Turkic languages share. Къ къ is a deep k made at the back of the mouth, the q of Kazakh or Tatar; you see it twice in the language's own name, къумукъ, and in къара (black). Гъ гъ is its voiced partner, a soft throaty gh close to a French r, as in агъач (tree, wood). Гь гь is a plain h.

Нг нг is the ng of English sing, a single sound, not n plus g. Оь оь and Уь уь are the rounded front vowels ö and ü of Turkish or German, used at the start of a word, as in уьй (house). After a consonant the same vowels are written with ё and ю instead, so кёп (many) and гюн (day) contain ö and ü, not yo and yu.

This is also why the hard sign ъ and soft sign ь are so frequent in Kumyk text: in Kumyk both are parts of several everyday letters, and leaving one out changes the word, while in Russian ъ marks a boundary before an iotated vowel and ь commonly marks consonant softness.

How to type Kumyk letters on any keyboard

Switch to the standard Russian layout (ЙЦУКЕН) and type each digraph as two keys. With the Russian layout active on a US-English keyboard, ъ sits on the ] key, ь on M, and ё on the ` key left of 1; so Къ is R then ], and Оь is J then M.

Windows: Settings, Time & language, Language, add Russian, then switch layouts with Win + Space. Mac: System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources, add Russian – PC. Phones: add a Russian keyboard in Gboard or on iOS; on most of them a long press on е gives ё and a long press on ь gives ъ.

No special characters are needed beyond these, but watch look-alikes: the Cyrillic с, о, е and к look exactly like Latin c, o, e and k, and a word typed with a mix will not be found by search. If you only need a few letters, copy them from this page.

Where the Kumyk language is spoken

Kumyk is the language of the Kumyks of Dagestan, the Russian republic on the Caspian Sea in the North Caucasus. CLDR estimates around 280,000 people literate in Kumyk and comfortable using it with computers; Russian census figures are higher. Most live on the lowland plain and the coast in the north and east of the republic, around Makhachkala, Buynaksk and Khasavyurt, with smaller communities in Chechnya and North Ossetia. It is one of Dagestan's written state languages.

For centuries Kumyk was also a common language of the North Caucasus: peoples who spoke very different Caucasian languages used it to trade and talk with one another and with outsiders, and the Shamkhalate of Tarki, a Kumyk state on the coast, was a regional power before Russian rule. Nearly all Kumyk speakers also speak Russian today, and prices are in rubles, ₽.

Kumyk belongs to the Kipchak branch of Turkic; its closest relative with a collection here is Karachay-Balkar, spoken further west in the Caucasus, and it is related more distantly to Tatar, Bashkir and Kazakh, while Turkish and Azerbaijani are cousins from the Oghuz branch. Its neighbours in Dagestan, Avar, Dargwa and Lezghian, are not Turkic at all, and Chechen lies just to the west. The country's flag and emoji are in the Russia collection 🇷🇺.