Tuvan,[a] sometimes spelt Tyvan,[b] is a Turkic language spoken in the Republic of Tuva in South Central Siberia, Russia.

The earliest record of Tuvan is from the early 19th century by Wūlǐyǎsūtái zhìlüè (Chinese: 烏里雅蘇台志略), Julius Klaproth 1823, Matthias Castrén 1857, Nikolay Katanov, Vasily Radlov, etc.

Tuvan, as spoken in Tuva, is principally divided into four dialect groups; Western, Central, Northeastern, Southeastern.

[5] One subset is the Jungar Tuvan language, originating in the Altai Mountains in the western region of Mongolia.

Contrastive low pitch may occur on short vowels, and when it does, it causes them to increase in duration by at least a half.

The late layer includes loanwords in which the long vowel does not change when the word entered Tuvan.

Tuvan marks nouns with six cases: genitive, accusative, dative, ablative, locative, and allative.

For a detailed scholarly study of auxiliary verbs in Tuvan and related languages, see Anderson 2004.

Tuvan vocabulary is mostly Turkic in origin but marked by a large number of Mongolian loanwords.

[citation needed] A Tuvan talking dictionary is produced by the Living Tongues Institute.

The first draft of a Tuvan alphabet based on Cyrillic was compiled by Roman Buzykaev (1875-1939) and B. Bryukhanov (Sotpa) in 1927.

This alphabet contained the letters Аа, Бб, Вв, Гг, Дд, Ёё, Жж, Ӝӝ, Зз, Ии, Йй, Кк, Лл, Мм, Нн, Ҥҥ, Оо, Ӧӧ, Пп, Рр, Сс, Тт, Уу, Ӱӱ, Хх, Чч, Шш, Ыы.

[11][12] A few books and newspapers, including primers intended to teach adults to read, were printed using this writing system.

[13] In the USSR, Aleksandr Palmbach, Yevgeny Polivanov, and Nicholas Poppe were engaged in the development of the Tuvan Latinized alphabet.

In early 1930, the Tuvan alphabet was finalized and officially introduced on June 28, 1930, by a decree of the TPR government.

For bibliographic purposes, transliteration of Tuvan generally follows the guidelines described in the ALA-LC Romanization tables for non-Slavic languages in Cyrillic script.

[16] Some Tuvans reportedly live at Kanas Lake in the northwestern part of Xinjiang, where they are not officially recognized, and are counted as a part of the local Oirat Mongol community that is counted under the general PRC official ethnic label of "Mongol".

Oirat and Tuvan children attend schools in which they use Chakhar Mongolian[17] and Mandarin Standard Chinese, native languages of neither group.