Kyrgyz is an extraordinarily poetic language at times, and nowhere is this more apparent than in its vowel harmony, which is one of the language’s most famous and defining features. But what is it, and how does it work?

Vowel harmony, in essence, is a set of rules that mean that in any truly Kyrgyz word (i.e. isn’t Russian, Persian, Tajik, Uzbek, Arabic, etc.), there will only be two vowels, and they will be of a related sound (i.e. left shift vowels are open-jawed and right-shift vowels are the same sound, with your jaw closed further. Try it with “oh” and “oo” and you can see that your mouth stays mostly in the same position, just closes slightly). It also dictates which vowels will be used in the formation of a suffix. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry. It doesn’t make sense to describe it in text, so I’ll walk us through a few examples.

Our first stop is this glorious table of relationships:

What this table shows is the vowel pairings in Kyrgyz. What this means, is that if a Kyrgyz word’s first vowel is ө, then every subsequent vowel in that word will either be ө or ү. The only exception to this rule is that if a word has a у, then the subsequent vowels can be either а or о (if it’s а, then subsequent vowels can only be а or ы).

So the harmony makes sense in terms of the nouns’ spelling, but what about with conjugation? Kyrgyz is a language that is all about endings. In fact, as far as I can tell, there aren’t ANY prefixes in the language – every piece of meaning beyond an initial definition comes in suffixes. And each of these suffixes changes its vowels around based on the vowels in the rest of the word.

Ok, enough lingusitics mumbo-jumbo; let’s take a look at how this actually manifests in a very simple construction, which is the question ending. This is put on the last word in any sentence to turn it into a yes/no question. These examples are asking if something is/isn’t an object.

This is the formula: word + б/п + right shift vowel

In practice:

Бул Кыргызстанбы? (Bool Kyrgyzstanbuh, is this Kyrgyzstan?)Бул столбу? (Bool stolboo, is this a stool?)Ал бугалтерби? (Al boogalterbee, is he/she an accountant?)
Бул гүлбү? (Bool gülbü, is this a flower?)
Бул тамакпы? (Bool tamakpuh, is this food?)
Бул китеппи? (Bool keeteppee, is this a book?)

There’s actually 8 permutations of the ending in this situation, but I couldn’t think of ones for the p-versions for the less common vowels. The B versus P sound comes from the preceding consonant; if it’s voiced (think if you make a voice sound or just use air to sound the letter; it’s the difference between s and z, and between b/p, sh/zh, d/t etc.). Generally, I don’t think about it, because if your vocal cords are already active when you get to the consonant, then you’ll voice the b, but if they aren’t then you’ll make a p sound instead. You can’t even tell the difference in fast speech between many of these permutations, but it definitely gives me a headache when it comes to writing it all down.

So, now we see that this carries the sound patterns throughout conjugations, let’s take a look back at my last Language Lesson to see how this works on some of the longer words:

Remember саламатсызбы? Take a look and you’ll notice that the vowels are only а and ы. You may also notice the question ending I just talked about. You’ll also notice that it’s easier to pronounce a long word that only uses two closely related vowel sounds rather than jumping around between a whole lot of different vowel sounds; you can, to a certain extent, leave your mouth in one position.

Vowel harmony is confusing initially, because you think to yourself, “Great Scott, how am I ever going to have a mind that works fast enough to make the right consonant and vowel combination come out in rapid speech? Especially if it has two or three shifting vowels in a row? But, with some practice, you not only memorize common combinations, but you also realize that a) some of the permutations are almost never used, that no words will ever shift to an о, and that the three Russian dipthong vowels all follow the logical pattern of their terminal sound.

Oh, and in hindsight, I forgot to mention that “б,” when it’s between two vowels, is pronounced like “в” (vee instead of bee), so there’s really 12 question endings to choose from in terms of how each one sounds. Don’t worry; I make mistakes on them every day!

Example: Бул соткабы? (Bool sotkavuh, is this a cellphone?)

Probably the most common example of this is the word for yes, ооба. On first look, one would think it’s pronounced “ooba,” but it’s actually pronounced “oh-vuh” or “oh-uh,” or if someone is just reacting to something, “OH.”

As much as I’ve learned to love the harmony, I’m placed in the South, where Uzbek is a common language. Uzbek doesn’t do vowel harmony, so it instead uses only one question ending: mi (ми). It’s so easy to use that even some Kyrgyz people even use the Uzbek question ending instead of the Kyrgyz one. Just another example of the linguistic adventure that is the south of Kyrgyzstan. More on that another time!