[7] Southern Altai is a member of the Turkic language family.

Within this family, there have been various attempts to classify Altai, and not all of them agree as to its position as it has a number of ambiguous characteristics.

[8] Due to certain similarities with Kyrgyz, some scholars group Altai with the Kyrgyz–Kipchak subgroup of the Kypchak languages.

Southern Altai employs a version of the Cyrillic alphabet with additional characters to represent sounds not found in Russian.

This article about a Turkic language or related topic is a stub.