Today is September 23rd, and it marks a somewhat unusual holiday, one of a type that is becoming common across Central Asia: National Kyrgyz Language Day. Perhaps it seems self evident that the national language of Kyrgyzstan would be Kyrgyz, but it’s not quite that simple thanks to the country’s history. And to understand that history, we’ve got to do a little bit of linguistic anthropology. Let’s dive in.
The Kyrgyz language is a Turkic language believed to originate from a Proto-Turkic (clarification: Turkish is the language spoken in Turkey. Turkic is the ancestor language and the name of the language family. Confusing, I know) language spoken by a people living near the Yenisei River in Siberia, north of Mongolia, part of the Altaic language family of the region (which, by the way, some linguists say includes Japanese, of all languages). That’s an awful long way from Turkey, though, so what happened?
Well, the language originated around the 7th century, but was only spoken for the most part. Until the 1920’s, most all of the Turkic languages were written in Arabic script, with literacy well below 10%. This meant that the languages all tended to morph and evolve over time since they were not standardized until recently. This allowed what was initially one language 1500 years ago to evolve into 53 different languages, of which 40 are still widely spoken from Lithuania to China. Many of these languages are still mutually intelligible, as they are closer to each other than many European languages.
The Turkic languages spread from this one ancestor near Lake Baikal across Central Asia to modern Anatolia and the Ottoman Empire, and in each place they remained and mixed with other languages. This is the reason that Uzbek and Turkish have so much Persian in them, and that Persian has so many Turkic words in it. There was a lot of interplay between all of these languages, and even with Russian – to this day, the Russian word for money (dengi) actually is from a Turkic root.
Up until the 1920’s, Kyrgyz was a spoken and societal language, but when it became a colony of the Russian Empire and a part of the Soviet Union, the official language became Russian. Under Stalin, much nationalistic activity was heavily suppressed in Kyrgyzstan, and Kyrgyz language was no exception – during the entire Soviet period, Russian was the official language of government and business, and all schools were in Russian, except in a few isolated instances in remote villages.
Kyrgyz itself was never really written (other than in Turkic runes) until 1923, when an Arabic writing system was created for it. It switched to Latin in 1928 alongside several other Central Asian republics, before changing to Cyrillic in 1940. Thanks to an enormous Soviet literacy campaign, nearly every person in the USSR was literate by the 1950’s, the fastest such increase in history. But most of that was focused on reading and writing Russian. A different Cyrillic was used for each of the Central Asian Turkic and Persian languages, and now as well the Latin alphabets used for Kazakh, Uzbek, and Turkmen are each different from each other and from Turkish Latin.
Fast forward to 1991, the year of Kyrgyzstan’s independence, when Bishkek’s population was barely 25% Kyrgyz, Russian is the only official language of media, education, and business, and for the most part, Kyrgyz has been a private home family language. Almost the entire population can understand the language, but speaking ability varies widely.
As part of the nation-building process, Kyrgyz was declared the national language, and all official business was required to take place in Kyrgyz by 1997. For Russians, Germans, and others, this was something of a big burden, not to mention the fact that many of the country’s politicians had only been speaking Russian for most of their careers. As you might expect, it was a challenging transition to make, but it was important to many people to preserve the language, and along with it, a lot of Kyrgyzstan’s cultural heritage, like the orally recited Epic of Manas.
However, the process of “Kyrgyzification” was difficult for many of Kyrgyzstan’s non-Kyrgyz population (for reference, in the 1999 census, about 35% of the population was not ethnic Kyrgyz). In 1996, the government decided to compromise and made Russian a second official language (but not the “national language”), allowing there to be translators in parliament for politicians who required such assistance, and allowing Russian to continue as a commonly used language. Because many of the other groups living in Kyrgyzstan spoke Russian (for example, some of the Koreans in Central Asia don’t know Korean), not just Russians, this seems quite reasonable. The population’s continuing knowledge of Russian seems to also be an important economic asset to the population.
One part of preserving the Kyrgyz language? Recognizing and celebrating it with its own holiday! Somewhere along the line, the government created National Kyrgyz Language Day, or some variation on that title, to recognize and promote knowledge and study of Kyrgyz to the population. Now, in rural areas, people often only know Kyrgyz. But in many of the cities, especially Bishkek, where Russian is still a dominant language, the event reminds people to maintain ties to the language and their heritage.
Last year, my former counterpart took me (well, rather, she grabbed my arm and literally dragged me to the Drama Theater, said “sit here” and promptly disappeared to sit elsewhere) to the Osh City Kyrgyz Language Celebration at the Drama Theater, where we watched a performance of song and dance to celebrate the language for about two hours. It was really cool to see some of the ways that people are striving to preserve and elevate parts of the culture here.
As an Alaskan, it’s very interesting to me as well to watch this process from a decidedly different stage than we have experienced in Alaska. Like the USSR, the US forced students to learn English in schools, but in the US (and in Canada and Australia, among other places), they also banned them from speaking their own native languages. Sadly, this went on for a longer time, and to a much stricter standard than in Kyrgyzstan (people could still speak Kyrgyz from what I understand). As a result, most Alaska Native languages have either died out or have less than 100 native speakers remaining. Many people now are working very hard to study, catalogue, and preserve these languages before the last native speakers are lost to time, and many young people are now learning them in an effort to reconnect with their culture and roots. It’s really interesting to see this thing that both Kyrgyzstan and Alaska have in common, and the efforts that people are investing in celebrating their culture and their language in both places. And, thankfully, the Kyrgyz language is thriving, relatively speaking.
With 4.3 million native speakers, Kyrgyz is not even in the top 100 most spoken languages in the world. If I were choosing languages to learn solely by the number of native speakers, I would have been better off choosing to learn the informal city dialect of Shanghainese with its 80 million native speakers, or the South African Xhosa language, with 7.6 million native speakers. I could have chosen to speak Russian while I was here, since it has the most job transferability after my service here and is one of the most spoken languages in the world. But there is nothing that compares to the look on someone’s face here when I show them the respect of having learned even just how to say hello in Kyrgyz, their language. That alone is my single favorite thing about living here, and it’s made every minute I spent studying this language worth it to me.
I’m so lucky that I’ve had a chance to learn Kyrgyz, and I’m lucky for all the doors it has opened to me here. And I’m looking forward to continuing to use it as my primary language for the rest of my service (with a healthy dose of Uzbek and Russian as needed, of course!).
Got questions? Let me know in the comments!