Kyrgyz was originally written in Göktürk script,[2] gradually replaced by the Perso-Arabic alphabet (in use until 1928 in the USSR, still in use in China).

In 1940, Soviet authorities replaced the Latin script with the Cyrillic alphabet for all Turkic languages on its territory.

When Kyrgyzstan became independent following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, a plan to adopt the Latin alphabet became popular.

[5][6][7] In 925, when the Liao dynasty defeated the Yenisei Kyrgyz and expelled them from the Mongolian steppes, some Ancient Kyrgyz elites settled in Altai and Xinjiang where they mixed with the local Kipchaks, resulting in a language shift.

Persian and Arabic vocabulary loaned to the Kyrgyz language, but to a much lesser extent than Kazakh, Uzbek and Uyghur.

[9] /a/ appears only in borrowings from Persian or when followed by a front vowel later in the word (regressive assimilation), e.g. /ajdøʃ/ 'sloping' instead of */ɑjdøʃ/.

[18] The Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan use a Cyrillic alphabet, which uses all the Russian letters plus ң, ө and ү.

In April 2023, Russia suspended dairy exports to Kyrgyzstan after a proposal by the chairman of Kyrgyzstan's National Commission for the State Language and Language Policies, Kanybek Osmonaliev, to change the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin to bring the country in line with other Turkic nations.

Osmonaliev was reprimanded by President Sadyr Japarov, who later clarified that Kyrgyzstan had no plans to replace the Cyrillic alphabet.

[18]Nouns in Kyrgyz take a number of case endings that change based on vowel harmony and the sort of consonant they follow (see the section on phonology).

Normally the decision between the velar ([ɡ ~ ɣ], [k]) and uvular ([ɢ ~ ʁ] and [χ ~ q]) pronunciation of ⟨г⟩ and ⟨к⟩ is based on the backness of the following vowel—i.e.