Because of its geographic proximity to the Shor and Khakas languages, some classifications place it in a Northern Turkic subgroup.

[7] Though they are traditionally considered one language, Southern Altai is not fully mutually intelligible with the Northern varieties.

The following features refer to the outcome of commonly used Turkic isoglosses in Northern Altai.

Forms of the word јок "no" include [coq] (Kuu dialect) and [joq] (Kumandy).

The language was written with the Latin script from 1928 to 1938, but has used Cyrillic (with the addition of 9 extra letters: Јј [d͡z~ɟ], Ҥҥ [ŋ], Ӧӧ [ø~œ], Ӱӱ [y~ʏ], Ғғ [ʁ], Ққ [q], Һһ [h], Ҹҹ [d͡ʑ], Ii [ɨ̹]) since 1938.

With this in mind, this is an inventory of some of these letters: After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, publishing books into Altai was resumed in 1921,[17] using a script similar to the Missionary's Alphabet.

As such, it took on this form (non-Russian letters bolded): Interestingly, in the same space, many considered adapting the old Mongolian script for use in writing Altai.

The final version of this alphabet was published in 1931, taking this form:[19] The Latin letters correspond as follows to the modern Cyrillic letters:[20] In 1938, the Central Research Institute of Language and Writing of the Peoples of the USSR began the project of designing a new alphabet for Altai, based on the Cyrillic script.

To amend for this, the Institute's first revised alphabet saw the graphemes ⟨Ёё⟩ and ⟨Юю⟩ for Altai's vowels /ø~œ/ and /y/ fall out of use, and the addition of two digraphs and two letters: ⟨Дь дь⟩ for /d͡ʒ/, ⟨Нъ нъ⟩for /ŋ/, ⟨Ӧӧ⟩ for /ø~œ/, and ⟨Ӱӱ⟩ for /y/.