Jany-Skript: A Latin Orthography and Comparative Testbed for the Kyrgyz Language

A design proposal, technical specification, and open testbed

Version: 4.0 Status: Public proposal (v1 of the orthography) and living testbed Author: emil@qylym.com Date: September 2026 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) / MIT for code

About this document

This is a design proposal, not a research report. It argues for a set of orthographic choices, states the reasoning behind each one, and names the places where the reasoning could be wrong. It does not report experimental results, and no claim in it should be read as an empirical finding unless a source is cited for it.

The author is a life-sciences professional and self-taught developer with university coursework in computing and philology, and thirty years of native Kyrgyz alongside fluent English and Russian. That standpoint shapes the document in two ways. Judgments about what reads naturally in Kyrgyz, what collides with what, and what people actually type are native-speaker judgments, offered as such. Judgments about tokenizers, collation, and rendering are an engineer's reasoning from documented behavior, and where they are predictions rather than measurements, they are marked as predictions and listed in §13 as things the testbed is built to check.

The orthography described here is at version 1. It has not been used at scale, has not been taught to anyone, and has not been through the kind of review that a state standard would require. The testbed exists so that its claims can be falsified by people who disagree with them.

Table of Contents

1. Abstract and Introduction
2. Scope, Standpoint, and Limitations
3. Design Principles
4. The Vowel System
5. Consonant Inventory
6. The k/q Question
7. The Back Unrounded Vowel: y and Dotless ı
8. Jany-Skript Among Existing Systems
9. Transliteration Architecture
10. Two Registers
11. The Testbed and Its Governance
12. Sociolinguistic and Political Context
13. Open Questions and Future Work
14. Conclusion
15. References

1. Abstract and Introduction

A Latin orthography for Kyrgyz (Кыргыз тили) sits where phonology, typographic engineering, and everyday digital practice meet, and the question is not hypothetical. In September 2024, at a meeting in Baku, the Turkic World Common Alphabet Commission, working under the Turkic Academy and the Organization of Turkic States, agreed on a proposed 34-letter Common Turkic Alphabet (CTA) [1][2]. Kyrgyzstan is the one OTS member that has not decided to move away from Cyrillic [2], and the Kyrgyz linguist who represented the country at those talks, Syrtbai Musaev, has said a 28-letter draft Latin alphabet for Kyrgyz is ready and awaiting a political decision by the president and parliament [2][3]. President Sadyr Japarov's stated position is that it is premature to discuss the transition and that development of the state language should continue in Cyrillic [3].

Whatever happens at that level, informal Latin transliteration is already routine. Kyrgyz speakers write Latin every day in messaging, code, social media, commerce, and diaspora communication, with no standard and considerable variation: ү appears as u, y, v, or w; ө as o, oe, or even the numeral 8; ж as j, zh, or dj; ң as n or ng; and vowel length is written with single letters, doubling, or a trailing h, depending on the writer. That variation is the problem this project addresses first, because it is a problem today regardless of state policy.

Jany-Skript offers two things:

1. A canonical orthography built to be typed and read now: Latin ö and ü; cedilla sibilants ç and ş; j for the voiced affricate; ŋ for the velar nasal; y for the close back unrounded vowel; doubling for phonemic length; and í for the palatal glide in every position.
2. A testbed in which each contested choice is a toggle. Swap ı for y, turn on allophonic q, switch the sibilants to digraphs, substitute ñ for ŋ, or display Cyrillic ө and Kazakh ұ inline, then read the same text under each configuration and judge for yourself.

Jany-Skript is designed to be derivable from Cyrillic. That constraint, more than any aesthetic preference, explains most of what follows, including the choices the author would make differently if starting from a blank page (§6).

2. Scope, Standpoint, and Limitations

2.1 What this system is for

Jany-Skript has two intended uses, and they pull in slightly different directions:

• A transliteration standard for text that already exists in Cyrillic, meant to run without human intervention over corpora, archives, place names, and databases.
• A candidate orthography for writing Kyrgyz directly in Latin, whether informally today or officially at some future point.

Where the two conflict, the transliteration use wins. The reason is practical: a proposal that cannot process the existing eighty-five years of Cyrillic text automatically is a proposal that begins by discarding the corpus. This is why k is unified rather than split into k/q (§6), why the loan glide is folded into the same í used everywhere else (§4.3), and why the reverse conversion is defined to favor native Kyrgyz over Russian loanwords (§9.1).

2.2 What this document does not contain

There is no evaluation section. Claims about tokenizer behavior, reading speed, keyboard throughput, font rendering, and search behavior are arguments from documented system behavior and from the author's experience, not measurements. Section 13 lists the ones that could be measured and what result would count against them. Readers who want numbers should treat this document as the hypothesis and the testbed as the apparatus.

2.3 Known limitations

• Latin→Cyrillic conversion is lossy for Russian loanwords. This is by design and is specified precisely in §9.1. Native Kyrgyz vocabulary round-trips exactly; loan-only distinctions (ц, щ, ё versus йо, ъ, ь) do not survive the round trip.
• The casual register is one-way. Text written in ASCII cannot be mechanically restored to the formal register or to Cyrillic (§10).
• ŋ is unevenly available on phones. It is reachable on the Android keyboard's long-press menu in the US locale (author-confirmed); iOS behavior is unverified. ñ remains available as a documented alternative (§5.3).
• Dialect coverage is partial. Three extended letters (ä, x, w) are offered for evaluation and none is canonical (§11.2); other dialect features are not represented at all.
• No pedagogy exists yet. Nothing here has been tested with learners, in classrooms, or in handwriting.

3. Design Principles

Principle 1 is the constraint the others are tuned around. Principle 5 is described in §10 and is the part of the system most often mistaken for a limitation.

4. The Vowel System

Kyrgyz has eight basic vowels, organized by front/back and rounded/unrounded harmony:

Six of these contrast short and long: аа, ээ, оо, өө, уу, үү. The two high unrounded vowels, ы and и, have no long counterparts [4]. Length is written by doubling throughout (§4.3).

The subsections below cover only the vowels where the Latin representation required a decision.

4.1 `ü` for `ү`, and the alternatives

The canonical letter for ү [y] is ü / Ü, matching Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Turkmen usage for the same vowel, and matching the 2021 Kazakh Latin alphabet, which also selected ü-umlaut for Kazakh ү [5]. Length is handled separately by doubling: short ü in kün (day), long üü in küü (melody).

The alternatives are paired, not independent. The testbed offers four configurations of the front rounded vowels, and three of them are the same experiment run with different glyphs:

This pairing matters for reading the results. Every alternative to ü ships alongside Cyrillic ө, so choosing ұ or ū does not trade one letter for another — it also accepts the script-mixing costs set out in §4.2. The costs compound rather than sit side by side, and kөrūū against körüü is what that compounding looks like on the page.

The macron ū was tested and set aside. In the IPA, in Latvian and Māori, and in the scholarly transcription of Kyrgyz itself, the macron marks vowel length. Kyrgyz has phonemic length, so a Kyrgyz reader encountering ū has an available and wrong reading for it — and because length is written by doubling, the long form is ūū, a sequence that reads as a double-length marking and has no real typographic precedent. The argument is specific to Kyrgyz rather than universal: the 2021 Kazakh alphabet uses ū-macron for Kazakh ұ [5], which works there because Kazakh does not carry the same length contrast. This is the general pattern of §8 in miniature: shared letters where the phonology is shared, divergence where it is not.

Kazakh ұ is retained as a transitional display option because Cyrillic-adjacent glyphs come up in script-planning discussion as a bridge for Cyrillic-literate readers. Two problems with it are worth stating. Its narrow crossbar is the feature that distinguishes it, and crossbars are what degrade first at small sizes and under aggressive anti-aliasing, at which point it approaches Latin y, a letter that already carries its own phonemic load here (§7). And unlike ü, which drops cleanly to ASCII u, ұ has no ASCII fallback at all, so it fails in exactly the environments the casual register exists for.

ü is the baseline. ū and ұ stay in the testbed as documented negative results rather than open questions — but as the table above shows, what they actually test is the hybrid script configuration, and that is how their output should be read.

4.2 `ö` for `ө`, and the cost of script-mixing

The canonical letter for ө [œ] is ö / Ö. Cyrillic ө is retained in the testbed as a display mode for transitional and educational material, not as a candidate for the standard.

The author finds inline Cyrillic ө perfectly legible, and that is precisely why it is worth being explicit about why it is not canonical. Keeping one Cyrillic letter inside otherwise-Latin text carries three costs that hold regardless of how legible any individual reader finds the glyph:

• Glyph metrics. Fonts without Cyrillic coverage substitute another face for that one glyph; fonts with it still draw their Latin and Cyrillic as separate designs, so ө commonly sits at a smaller x-height than the Latin lowercase beside it. Either way the word carries a letter that does not match its line, and the effect changes with every font stack the text passes through. This is the least speculative of the three costs, and the cheapest to check (§13.4).
• Collation. Under the Unicode Collation Algorithm, Latin and Cyrillic sort in different weight groups [6], so mixed strings sort unpredictably against pure-Latin ones. Alphabetizing a name list becomes locale-dependent in a way it need not be.
• Tokenization (predicted, not measured). SentencePiece splits input at Unicode script boundaries by default, so kөl may be segmented into three pieces rather than one [7]. Byte-level BPE tokenizers whose pre-tokenizer groups all letters regardless of script will not necessarily behave this way, and ö and ө occupy the same two bytes in UTF-8, so the effect is tokenizer-specific rather than universal. §13.1 states how to test it.

Standard ö avoids all three without asking anything of the reader that ü does not already ask.

4.3 Phonemic length, and the `е` problem

Length is written by doubling: ток [tok] (sated) against тоок (chicken), Ala-Too, aalam, jeek, kuu, küü. Doubling is preferred to macrons for three reasons: combining marks are stripped or normalized inconsistently by search and database layers; doubling needs no dead key or long-press, only the same key twice; and Kyrgyz Cyrillic already writes length by doubling, as does the Kyrgyz Arabic orthography [4], so the convention is inherited rather than invented.

A note on where this length comes from, since it is sometimes described as an archaism: Kyrgyz long vowels are largely a secondary development from the loss of intervocalic consonants (тоо from an older form with a velar), rather than a retention of Proto-Turkic length of the kind Turkmen preserves. The relevant fact for orthography is only that the contrast is live and phonemic in modern Kyrgyz.

The one irregularity that must be resolved explicitly is е. Kyrgyz Cyrillic never doubles it; long /eː/ is written ээ in every position (ээги, керээз, кээде, жээк), which Jany-Skript renders as it looks: ee (eegi, kereez, keede, jeek). But е has a second job in Russian loans, where it represents [je] word-initially (Европа, Енисей) and after a vowel (переезд, проект). Jany-Skript handles that with the glide letter it already has: loan [je] is íe (Íevropa, pereíezd, proíekt), native word-initial [e] stays e (ene, el), and post-consonantal [e] stays e (kel, mektep). Post-vocalic е in a loan that is not iotated in Kyrgyz speech, as in поэт and аэропорт, is written plain: poet, aeroport. Three graphemes — e, ee, íe — cover every position. What they do on the way back to Cyrillic is specified in §9.1.

4.4 The palatal glide `í`

Writing both и [i] and й [j] with plain i produces a barcode: бийик → biiik, кийим → kiiim, кийин → kiiin. Three or four vertical strokes in a row are hard to parse and impossible to tell from a long vowel. The testbed renders this mapping on demand (§11.1), so the claim can be judged on a page of real text rather than on three words.

The canonical glide is í / Í in every position: aí, toí, tyíyn, biíik, kiíim. Four arguments support it.

1. A separate glide letter is forced, not chosen. The CTA writes the glide y, which it can afford because it moves the back unrounded vowel to dotless ı [8]. Jany-Skript assigns y to that vowel (§7), so the two roles cannot share a letter. If they did, native sequences of vowel plus glide would collapse: тыйын as tyyyn, кыйык as kyyyk, айыл as ayyl. That is not a stylistic cost to be weighed; it is the same legibility failure the letter is meant to fix.

2. The acute is chosen for its relationship to й, not for its meaning elsewhere. й is и with a mark above it; í is i with a mark above it. A reader literate in Kyrgyz Cyrillic already treats that pair as related but distinct, and i/í carries the relationship across intact.

The objection to this is worth meeting directly, because the same reasoning rejected ū in §4.1: in Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Irish the acute marks length, and in Spanish it marks stress. The difference is what a Kyrgyz reader brings to the page. Kyrgyz stress is regular and never written, and Kyrgyz length is written by doubling, so within this system the acute has no competing job. The macron does: Kyrgyz scholarly transcription already uses it for length. The test being applied is internal consistency, not universal convention, and it gives different answers for the two marks.

Among the marks that can sit on i, the acute is also the lightest and the most available. A diaeresis (ï) would collide visually with the fronting marks on ö and ü. A breve (ĭ), the literal analogue of the Cyrillic letter and the choice of the ALA-LC romanization [8], and a caron (ǐ) are heavier at text sizes and sit outside Latin-1. A circumflex (î) is available, but in Turkish it marks length in Arabic loanwords (millî, tarihî) — the same objection that rules out the macron, and in the nearest Latin Turkic tradition. í (U+00ED) is in Latin-1, on Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, and Icelandic layouts, and on standard mobile long-press menus.

The one genuine conflict is with stress notation. Teaching materials, dictionaries, and foreign-language textbooks mark stressed syllables with an acute (a-tá, o-ro-mó), and on i that mark and the glide would be the same character. The conflict is narrower than it first appears: it arises only when stress falls on /i/, leaving every other vowel free to take a stress acute unambiguously, and Kyrgyz stress is largely predictable and word-final, so marking it is a device for exceptions and loans in a small body of specialized material rather than a feature of ordinary text. Weighed by frequency, the glide occurs in running text constantly and the stress mark does not. The resolution is to give pedagogy a device that does not compete with any letter — bolding the stressed syllable, or the IPA stress mark before it (bi-ˈíik) — which has the further advantage of working identically across the whole vowel inventory. §13.6 lists the convention as work still to be written.

The cautionary case is Kazakhstan's 2018 alphabet, which replaced the mocked apostrophes of 2017 with acute accents [9] and was itself criticized, partly over the acutes and the digraphs it retained, before being revised again in 2021 [10][5]. The lesson Jany-Skript takes from it is not that acutes fail, but that a diacritic scattered across six or seven letters reads as clutter in a way that a single, systematic use does not. í is one letter with one job.

3. It preserves lexical roots. Kyrgyz is agglutinative and stems must stay recognizable. Кийим (clothing) comes transparently from кий- (kií-, to wear); тийиштүү comes from тий- (tií-). Contracting these to kiim and tiishtüü truncates the verb stem and splits related forms arbitrarily: biíi (its dance) would keep the glide while biíik (tall) lost it.

4. It makes the glide exceptionless. Every Cyrillic й, in every position, is í. No positional rules, no lookups.

One concession. The barcode argument applies to the formal register only. In the casual register í drops to i and biíik becomes biiik again (§10). This is a real cost of the two-register design, not something the design escapes.

5. Consonant Inventory

5.1 `j` for `ж`

Native initial and medial ж is a voiced postalveolar affricate [dʒ], the sound of English j in journey, not the Russian-mediated fricative [ʒ] that zh implies. Jany-Skript writes j: jakshy, jaŋy, jol, jigit.

This is not a novel choice for Kyrgyz. The BGN/PCGN romanization, which the Kyrgyz government adopted for rendering geographic names in Latin script [8], also writes ж as j, and the result is visible on Kyrgyz passports and in international coverage: Japarov, Jalal-Abad. Against that, zh costs an extra keystroke on one of the highest-frequency consonants in the language and tells an international reader the wrong thing.

The divergence from the CTA, which assigns c to this sound and j to [ʒ] [8], is deliberate and is argued in §8.2.

5.2 Sibilants: `ç` and `ş`

The canonical sibilants are ç and ş: çaí, şaar. Digraphs were considered and set aside for the formal register because Kyrgyz morphology produces collisions with them.

The agentive suffix -чы/-чи on a stem ending in ш is the everyday case: баш + -чы → башчы gives the boundary-obscuring bashchy under digraphs, against the clean başçy with cedillas. The s+h sequence in personal names is the other: Исхак (Is-hak) transliterates via digraph to ishak, which is also how ишак would come out — a Russian and Uzbek word for "donkey" that most Kyrgyz speakers recognize, even though the native word is эшек. Cedillas keep them apart: ishak against işak.

Russian щ merges into ş (ящик → íaşik, борщ → borş) rather than producing a trigraph. Spoken Kyrgyz realizes it as [ʃ], and şç would collide in reverse with native başçy.

The digraphs are not discarded; they are relocated. janyToCyr accepts legacy ch, sh, and sch on reverse conversion so that older text and casual writing convert correctly, and the testbed can render whole texts in digraph mode for comparison. The ASCII register is treated in §10.

5.3 The velar nasal: `ŋ`, with `ñ` as an alternative

ŋ / Ŋ (U+014B / U+014A) marks the single phoneme [ŋ] and keeps it distinct from a real n+g cluster: күнгө (stem kün + dative -gö) stays küngö, while жаңы is jaŋy, not the ambiguous jangy.

The choice of eng has a specific justification. ŋ is graphically an n with a tail, exactly as Cyrillic ң is an н with a tail — and exactly as Tynystanov's own 1928 Latin letter for this sound, ꞑ, was an n with a descender [4]. Among the available options it is the one with continuity in both of Kyrgyz's own writing traditions. The CTA's ñ imports a mark from a different tradition, and for readers with any Spanish exposure it carries a specific wrong reading, the [ɲ] of piñata and mañana.

ŋ also has real costs, and they should be stated rather than argued away:

• Mobile availability is uneven. It is reachable by long-pressing n on the Android keyboard in the US locale; iOS and non-US locales have not been checked, and ñ is the option reliably present everywhere.
• Capital Ŋ has two different designs in circulation, an enlarged lowercase form and an N-based form, so all-caps text can look inconsistent across fonts.
• It sits outside Latin-1 and Windows-1252, where ñ is present.

Kazakhstan's recent revisions show this is a genuinely open question rather than a settled one: the version presented in January 2021 used Ŋ and the April 2021 version replaced it with Ñ [10], while the current Uzbek draft keeps the digraph ng for the same sound [10]. Jany-Skript keeps ŋ as canonical on the derivation and false-friend arguments, and ships ñ as a first-class testbed option for anyone who weighs mobile typing more heavily. The keyboard layouts in §11 make ŋ a single keystroke on desktop, and the casual register writes it n (jaŋy → jany), which is what people already type.

5.4 Loan signs `ъ` and `ь`

The hard and soft signs mark hiatus and palatalization that Jany-Skript captures with the glide it already has. A separating sign before an iotated vowel is absorbed into í (объект → obíekt, семья → semía, разъезд → razíezd). A coda soft sign, which Kyrgyz phonology does not realize as palatalization in natural speech, is dropped (июль → iíul, апрель → aprel, роль → rol). Iotated vowels decompose consistently: я → ía, ё → ío, ю → íu (saíakat, koíon, aíuu), while non-iotated hiatus stays plain (диаграмма → diagramma).

The result is that every Jany-Skript word is a continuous alphabetic string matching \p{L}+, with no internal apostrophes. That property has concrete consequences: search indexes and naive tokenizers do not fracture the word at a punctuation mark, and double-clicking selects all of it [11]. Uzbek, which uses apostrophes in oʻ and gʻ, offers a live demonstration of what the alternative costs in practice, since the mark is routinely replaced by whichever quote character the keyboard produces.

This property does not, however, make URLs ASCII-clean. í, ŋ, ö, ü, ç, and ş are all non-ASCII and percent-encode in a URL path (ŋ becomes %C5%8B). What the \p{L}+ property gives is a single, unbroken token; what produces clean slugs is the ASCII register (§10), which is the correct layer for slug generation: jaŋylyktar → janylyktar.

6. The k/q Question: Synharmonic Allophony

Several Turkic orthographies use separate letters for the uvular stop [q] and the uvular fricative [ʁ]. In Kyrgyz these are positional allophones, predictable from the vowels of the word:

A Kyrgyz speaker reading kar produces [q] automatically; producing front [k] there would violate the language's phonotactics. Writing the two separately encodes a rule speakers already apply. Turkish makes the same choice for k and g on the same grounds, though it retains ğ for a related distinction.

The author's own preference is q. On phonological grounds it is the more honest letter, it is what most of the Turkic and Arabic-script world reaches for, and it has real historical weight in Kyrgyz specifically. The canonical standard nevertheless unifies k and g, and the reason is Principle 1 rather than a belief that q is wrong.

What the q route pulls in. If q is written, the voiced counterpart becomes an immediate question: egemen has front [g], kagyluu has back [ʁ], and if the voiceless distinction is worth a letter, symmetry says the voiced one is too. Both of the historical answers agree on this. Tynystanov's 1928 alphabet had q and ƣ alongside k and g [4]; the CTA has q and ğ [8]; the 2021 Kazakh alphabet uses ğ-breve for ғ [5]. A q-without-ğ system is possible — the vowels predict g's value just as they predicted k's — but it is asymmetric, and the asymmetry has to be defended rather than assumed. The testbed's q mode currently leaves g unified; whether it should also derive ğ is an open question (§13.6).

Why the canonical standard stays with k and g:

• Derivability from Cyrillic. Kyrgyz Cyrillic has never had a separate қ [4], so q cannot be recovered from the source text by any rule that does not also know which words are loans. Note the historical nuance: the merge was not Tynystanov's doing. His Arabic reform and his Latin alphabet both distinguished the two sounds [4]. The single К arrived with the Cyrillic alphabet in 1940, two years after he was executed in the purges. Whoever made that decision and for whatever reason, eighty-five years of literacy have since been built on it.
• Loanwords. Modern Kyrgyz absorbs kosmos, karta, bank, respublika, all with plain European [k], never [q]. A harmony rule cannot tell them from native back-harmonic stems: it produces qosmos, parqta, and mixed-harmonic hybrids like Respubliqası for correct Respublikasy. There is no clean fix short of a maintained loanword lexicon — which is exactly what a state-backed standard could afford and an automatic converter cannot.
• Keyboard and algorithmic economy. Dropping q and ğ removes two keys and keeps the conversion rule-based.

There is a real counter-argument that deserves to be on the page rather than buried: because loans keep velar [k] in back-vowel words, [k] and [q] arguably now contrast in modern spoken Kyrgyz (kosmos against koş), which is the classic profile of an allophone becoming a phoneme. If that analysis is right, a future standard written by people rather than derived by machine should adopt q. Jany-Skript's position is narrower than "q is wrong": it is that q cannot be derived from Cyrillic without a lexicon, and this system is defined by derivability.

One interaction worth flagging. The harmony rule above reads the vowels to decide the consonant, so it is only as good as the vowel inventory it reads. Standard Cyrillic writes one а for both the back vowel and the fronted variant that appears in Persian-derived and harmonically assimilated words, so q mode has no way to tell äka from aqa, ükä from üqa, or källä from qalla. Writing ä (§11.2) supplies exactly the information the rule is missing. That makes the two options dependent rather than independent: a fair evaluation of q on southern text is an evaluation of q with ä enabled.

The testbed's q toggle exists so this can be checked rather than asserted. Run it over contemporary news or social-media text and the loanword distortions appear immediately.

7. The Back Unrounded Vowel: `y` and Dotless `ı`

The CTA and Turkish write ы [ɯ] as dotless ı [8]. Jany-Skript writes y, and the testbed lets you swap them. Doing so surfaces two compounding problems.

Casing. Dotless ı and dotted i are the lowercase forms of two different uppercase letters, and mapping them correctly requires locale-aware case conversion; the Turkish and Azerbaijani mappings are a documented special case in the Unicode Character Database [12]. Outside a tr_TR or az_AZ locale — that is, in most databases, search indexes, and language runtimes — naive uppercasing turns kırgız into KIRGIZ, reproducing an outdated exonym rather than the internationally used KYRGYZ. Latin y uppercases correctly everywhere with no configuration. The state's own English-language name, established since 1991 across treaties, passports, and diplomatic usage, is Kyrgyz Republic, with y.

A cascade into the consonants. y and i are unmistakable at any size, so kyna and kina never collide. Under dotless ı, the same pair differs by a single dot, a distinction that degrades in small type, in all-caps, in handwriting, and on low-resolution screens. The testbed's ı mode compensates by force-enabling allophonic q, because a consonant-level distinction is needed once the vowel-level one is unreliable. That is the tell: adopting ı does not cost one thing, it reopens the letter-count question §6 closed.

And the loss is not confined to small type. The casual register is plain ASCII by definition, so ı folds to i there (§10), and search folding does the same (§9.4). Under dotless ı, kına and kina are therefore one string in casual writing and one key in an index — the distinction survives only in the formal register. With y, it survives everywhere.

Musaev's proposal, which is built on Tynystanov's alphabet rather than on the CTA, also uses y for ы according to the alphabet chart published with his 2024 remarks [3] — worth noting as independent agreement from a source with no reason to align with this one. It is also a departure from his own historical base, since Tynystanov wrote ы as ь and used y for ү [4].

8. Jany-Skript Among Existing Systems

8.1 Existing romanizations of Kyrgyz

There is no generally accepted romanization of Kyrgyz; for geographic names the government adopted BGN/PCGN [8]. Four systems are in circulation, and Jany-Skript's relationship to each is different.

(BGN/PCGN, ALA-LC, ISO 9, and CTA columns after [8].)

BGN/PCGN is the system with official standing in Kyrgyzstan, and Jany-Skript agrees with it on the two letters that matter most for recognizability: j for ж and ö/ü for the front rounded vowels. It is a transcription for foreign readers rather than an orthography, and it shows: it writes both й and ы as y, which is exactly the merger §4.4 argues is unreadable in running Kyrgyz text (тыйын would be tyyyn), and it uses digraphs ch, sh, kh, ng that collide at morpheme boundaries (§5.2). Its strength is that it needs no letters beyond ö and ü; its weakness is that it was never meant to be written by Kyrgyz speakers.

ALA-LC is a library cataloguing standard and optimizes for reversibility with combining marks (n͡g, u̇, ĭ). It is the only system that shares Jany-Skript's instinct about the glide, writing й as ĭ — a mark on i, for the same reason given in §4.4. But its combining diacritics are the specific thing §4.3 avoids: they normalize inconsistently and are unusable on an ordinary keyboard.

ISO 9 is a mechanical Cyrillic-to-Latin mapping designed to be script-agnostic, not language-specific. It writes й as j and ж as ž, which is precisely backwards from the perspective of a language where ж is [dʒ]. It round-trips perfectly and reads badly, which is a reasonable trade for a bibliographic standard and not for an orthography.

The CTA is treated in §8.2.

Jany-Skript's differences from all four come from a different goal. These systems transcribe Kyrgyz into Latin for people who read something else. Jany-Skript is meant to be read as Kyrgyz.

8.2 The Common Turkic Alphabet

The 34-letter CTA agreed in Baku in September 2024 [1][2] is intended as a shared baseline across the Turkic world, with each country adapting it nationally [3]. Jany-Skript shares its functional core wherever Kyrgyz phonology supports it — ö, ü, ç, ş all match — and diverges on two letters.

í where the CTA uses y. The CTA can use y for the glide because it moves ы to dotless ı. Jany-Skript's y is committed to that vowel (§7), so the roles are mutually exclusive rather than a matter of taste.

j where the CTA uses c. In the CTA, following Turkish, c is [dʒ] and j is the [ʒ] of loanwords. Jany-Skript inverts this. To a reader without Turkish literacy, c is not a neutral symbol: it suggests [s] to a French-influenced reader and [k] to an English one. j is read as something close to [dʒ] by nearly every Latin-literate reader who has not been trained on Turkish, and it is already the letter used for ж in Kyrgyz official romanization (§5.1). For a system aimed at diaspora typing on non-Turkish keyboards and at international legibility, c is a false friend.

This is also a divergence from the Kyrgyz Latin tradition, not just from a modern committee. Tynystanov's alphabet used j for the glide й and c for the affricate ж (replaced by ƶ in the 1938 revision) [4], the same assignment the CTA and Musaev use. Jany-Skript accepts the break: ƶ reads as a modified z, which signals [dʒ] no better than c does, and it remains a rare Latin Extended-B character with thin font coverage.

Beyond letters, the argument for not adopting the CTA wholesale is structural. Kyrgyz has phonemic vowel length that Turkish lacks; Kyrgyz ж is an affricate where Turkish j is a fricative; Kazakh underwent sibilant shifts Kyrgyz did not. An orthography tuned to its own phonology will converge with a pan-Turkic standard where the phonology converges and diverge where it does not, which is the pattern above. The CTA itself anticipates this: a participant at Baku noted that a language needing fewer than all 34 letters can adapt the alphabet to itself [3].

There is also a computational consideration, offered as a prediction rather than a finding: if Kyrgyz text becomes orthographically near-identical to Turkish, Azerbaijani, or Uzbek text, automatic language identification and search have less to work with, and a smaller language competing for visibility against larger neighbors may be harder to retrieve as itself. §13.2 states the experiment that would confirm or refute this. It should not be overstated — language identification works mostly on vocabulary and character n-grams, and Turkish and Azerbaijani are distinguished successfully despite near-identical alphabets.

8.3 Musaev's historical revival

Syrtbai Musaev, director of the linguistics institute at I. Arabaev Kyrgyz State University and one of Kyrgyzstan's representatives at the 2024 Baku talks, proposes a 28-letter Latin alphabet built on Tynystanov's project, arguing that it preserves the phonemic structure of Kyrgyz completely and therefore raises no linguistic problems [3]. He is explicit that alphabet and orthography are political questions in Kyrgyzstan: a change requires a decision by the president and a resolution of the Jogorku Kenesh, and scholars can only propose [3].

The two proposals agree on more than they disagree on. Both use ö, ü, ç, ş, and both use y for ы [3]. The divergences follow from his being a revival and this being a fresh design: his alphabet restores the k/q split that Tynystanov's had (§6), writes ж as c after Tynystanov and the CTA (§8.2), and marks the velar nasal with a tailed ņ rather than eng. On that last point the difference is small and the reasoning is shared — a tail on n, mirroring the Cyrillic and Arabic source letters — and ŋ has the better font and IPA support of the two.

The more consequential difference is not linguistic. Musaev's proposal has a plausible route to becoming law that Jany-Skript neither has nor claims. Jany-Skript's contribution runs the other way: it exists as running software today, engineered against problems — deterministic Cyrillic round-tripping, tokenization, search folding, an ASCII register — that a 1920s alphabet was never built to answer. They are not competing for the same job.

8.4 Other domestic proposals

Musaev's is not the only Kyrgyz Latin project. A 30-letter alphabet published at qyrgyz.com, developed with input from historian Tynchtykbek Chorotegin and others, likewise starts from the 1930s Latin alphabet but modernizes its rare letters, replacing Ƣ with Ğ and Ь with Y, and normalizing Ꞑ, Ɵ, and Y to Ñ, Ö, and Ü [13].

Jany-Skript agrees with it on Y for ы, Ö, and Ü — three points of independent convergence across three separate projects, which is about as much evidence as a proposal of this kind can hope for. It diverges on Ğ and Ñ for the reasons given in §6 and §5.3 respectively, and those reasons are unchanged by the fact that a domestic proposal reaches a different conclusion.

8.5 What Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan demonstrate

Kazakhstan is the most useful comparison available, because it shows what happens to an alphabet between decree and daily use. The 2017 decree introduced an apostrophe-based alphabet that was widely mocked; in February 2018 a second decree replaced the apostrophes with acute accents [9]; the acute version was itself criticized, in part over the acutes and the digraphs it retained [15]; and in 2021 a further revision settled on 31 letters using umlauts, a macron, a breve, and a cedilla — ä, ö, ü, ū, ğ, ş [5]. Even within 2021 the velar nasal changed from Ŋ to Ñ between the January and April versions [10]. The completion date has moved from 2025 to 2031 [14]. Uzbekistan began its transition in 1993 and it is still not complete [3], with a 2021 draft revision still retaining the digraph ng [10].

Three lessons carry into this document. First, letter-level decisions that look settled get reopened, which is an argument for shipping a testbed rather than a decree. Second, diacritic systems are judged publicly on how they look in bulk, not on their phonological logic, which is why §4.4 restricts the acute to a single systematic use. Third, the gap between adopting an alphabet and writing in it is measured in decades.

Kyrgyzstan has its own version of the third lesson, and it is closer to home: an orthography reform adopted in 2004 was rolled back after the public did not take it up [3].

9. Transliteration Architecture

Cyrillic→Latin conversion is deterministic and rule-based: every canonical form is computed from position and vowel context, with no lexicon. Latin→Cyrillic conversion is also deterministic, but it is not lossless, because the Cyrillic→Latin mapping is not injective. Several Cyrillic distinctions that exist only in Russian loanwords are deliberately merged.

9.1 The native-priority rule

Where two Cyrillic spellings map to the same Latin string, reverse conversion restores the one that occurs in native Kyrgyz vocabulary. Distinctions that exist only in Russian loanwords are the ones allowed to be lost.

This single rule decides every ambiguous case, and it follows from Principle 1: the corpus that must survive automatic conversion is the Kyrgyz one.

Which losses appear in the table is partly downstream of a question §13.6 leaves open: whether loanwords are spelled from their Russian source or from Kyrgyz pronunciation. poet → поет and aeroport → аеропорт are losses under the current approximating treatment and would not be under a source-faithful one. Either way, the general point stands — a conversion that preserves every loanword spelling in both directions needs lookup dictionaries, which a state-backed standard could maintain and a rule-based converter cannot.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. The ts rule is what keeps common native forms intact: reversing every ts to ц corrupts өтсө into өцө, so native forms take priority and loan ц is the casualty. And кийет ↔ kiíet now round-trips exactly, which is what the root-preservation argument in §4.4 requires; the price is that проект comes back as пройект.

9.2 The optional loan-restoration list

Losing loanword spellings is acceptable for corpus work and unacceptable for, say, converting a legal text. The reference engine therefore ships a small, explicitly documented loan-restoration list — the known loanwords whose Cyrillic form cannot be derived by rule (semía → семья, statía → статья, Ishak → Исхак in digraph mode, and similar) — layered on top of the rule-based core and switchable.

This list is a lookup table, and the document should say so rather than claiming the pipeline has none. The distinction that matters is architectural: the core is complete and dictionary-free on its own, and the list only ever restores loan spellings that the core has already flagged as lossy. It never affects native vocabulary and never changes Cyrillic→Latin output.

Note one asymmetry the list introduces: a bypass that restores ishak to Исхак will get the Russian loan ишак wrong in digraph mode. That trade is deliberate — the proper name is the one that appears in documents — and it is the kind of thing an exception list always costs.

9.3 The `e` system

The э/е/glide system is the least intuitive part of the standard, so the algorithm is stated in full:

1. Forward. Word-initial or post-vocalic е in an iotated loan → íe. Doubled ээ → ee. Word-initial э → e. Post-consonantal е → e. Post-vocalic э in a non-iotated loan → e.
2. Reverse. ee → ээ. Word-initial e → э. Post-consonantal e → е. Post-vocalic e → е. íe per the table in §9.1.
3. Glide. í → й everywhere except in the sequences resolved above. Legacy iy/iyi input (biyik) is accepted on reverse conversion without being canonical output.
4. Iotation. ía → я, ío → ё, íu → ю; hiatus without a glide stays plain (diagramma → диаграмма).

9.4 Normalization, folding, and collation

Three computational requirements that an orthography proposal usually omits, and that anyone implementing this one will hit immediately:

• Normalization. Canonical output is NFC [16]. í, ö, and ü all have precomposed codepoints, and decomposed input should be normalized on the way in. ŋ has no decomposition at all, which matters for the next point.
• Search folding. A single foldKey() maps any register to one index key: ö→o, ü→u, í→i, ç→c, ş→s, ŋ→n, then casefold. For five of the six formal letters this is exactly what standard accent-stripping already does, because ç, ş, ö, ü, and í decompose under NFD; ä folds to a the same way. ŋ is the exception among the formal letters and must be handled explicitly, since no amount of Unicode normalization will fold it to n. So is ñ→n (the §5.3 alternative) and ı→i (the §7 dotless option, which also keeps the casual register plain ASCII).
• Two folds are configuration-dependent. When the compose-mode letters of §11.2 are enabled, x→h and w→v unify the distinctions that reverse conversion deliberately loses, so a search for haram matches xaram and tav matches taw. When they are not enabled, x and w are ordinary Latin letters in foreign names and must fold to themselves: Linux, LAX, and X Factor are not Kyrgyz words with a velar fricative, and folding them to linuh and lah would be wrong in an index that holds mixed-language content. The fold follows the configuration; it is not a property of the letters.
• Register equivalence holds for the strip fallback. With the canonical ASCII mapping, the casual register is the folded form, so çaí and cai land on the same key (§10). Under the transitional digraph fallback the casual form is chai, which folds to a different key unless the index also applies ch→c and sh→s. Any deployment that indexes digraph-style text needs that extra pair of rules; the strip fallback needs nothing.
• Collation. Under default UCA ordering, ç sorts as a variant of c and ş as a variant of s, which is not the Kyrgyz alphabetical order [6]. A Jany-Skript locale needs a collation tailoring, in the way Turkish tailors ı/i. The alphabet order itself is defined in SPEC.md; the tailoring is not yet written (§13.6).

10. Two Registers

Jany-Skript defines two registers together rather than one script with a workaround attached.

The formal register — ö, ü, í, ŋ, ç, ş — is the complete form: print, dictionaries, official text, canonical testbed output, and anywhere the orthography is presented as itself.

The casual register is plain ASCII, for unmodified keyboards:

ö → o, ü → u, í → i, ŋ → n, ç → c, ş → s

Every letter loses its diacritic and nothing else. Çaí becomes cai, şaar becomes saar, jaŋy becomes jany, biíik becomes biiik.

Why the sibilants strip rather than expand. The case for mapping ç → ch and ş → sh instead is real: the digraphs signal the sound better to a reader, and they are what people type today (chai, jakshy). Two considerations outweigh it here. First, coherence: if every other letter loses a mark, the sibilants should too, and the casual form then teaches the shape of the formal one instead of competing with it — the reader who types cai is one diacritic away from çaí, while the reader who types chai is spelling a different word shape. Second, folding: standard accent-stripping already maps ç→c and ş→s, so with this mapping the casual register is the folded form and foldKey() is nearly free (§9.4). With digraphs, the two registers fold to different keys and every index needs custom handling.

The digraph fallback is best understood as transitional rather than as a co-equal style. It exists because chai and jakshy are what people type today, and because the project's own early drafts used ch/sh as the reference standard. The direction it is transitional toward is the strip mapping, and further: over a long enough horizon the natural endpoint for a reader who has internalized ç is plain c throughout — çöírö casually written coiro — which is where the coherence argument above ultimately points.

The cost is a merger. Stripping ş to s merges it with native s: баш and бас both become bas, аш and ас both become as. Digraph fallback avoids that merger but reintroduces the sh ≈ с+х collision and lengthens the word. This is a genuine trade, so the testbed implements both fallbacks and lets a reader compare them over real text. The right way to settle it is to count how many distinct words each mapping merges across a corpus (§13.3).

The casual register already has mergers anyway, and always did: кол (hand) and көл (lake) both surface as kol; жаңы (new) and жаны (his soul) both as jany. This matches how Kyrgyz speakers already text, and it resolves the way informal writing always resolves ambiguity — from context, in real time.

Two properties to be honest about:

• The casual register is one-way. biiik cannot be mechanically restored to biíik, and cai cannot be restored to çaí or to чай. ASCII text is a destination, not an intermediate form. Conversion tools should accept it as input on a best-effort basis and should not claim round-tripping.
• It is a departure from current habit, not a description of it. ö→o, ü→u, í→i, and ŋ→n match what people type now. ç→c and ş→s do not; chai and jakshy are the live forms. This mapping is an attempt to pull habit toward the formal standard, which is a normative choice and should not be presented as a descriptive one.

11. The Testbed and Its Governance

11.1 The web testbed

A client-side application offers one-click presets — the canonical baseline against a CTA-aligned configuration (ö/ü, ı, y, ç/ş, k/q) — alongside selectable options for each variable argued above:

A side-by-side inspector runs any combination against real text.

Two couplings in that table are testbed behavior rather than properties of the mapping. Selecting ı also switches the uvular option to q, for the reason given in §7, and switching back to y restores k along with the í glide; q can be set independently afterwards, so ı with k remains reachable. The y glide is offered only while ы is written ı, since under y the two would collide (§4.4). A third pairing is warned about rather than prevented: selecting the ĩ glide while the velar nasal is ñ puts the same tilde on two letters for two unrelated jobs, so the testbed says so and lets the reader judge the result. The engine itself imposes none of these rules: every combination of options is a valid call.

The toggles are not a menu of equally valid house styles. Each one is a way to generate the counterexample yourself: turn on q and watch kosmos become qosmos; turn on ı and uppercase the result; turn on Cyrillic ө and sort a name list.

11.2 Extended letters under evaluation

Three sound distinctions exist in Kyrgyz speech that Kyrgyz Cyrillic does not write. Latin has letters for all three, the letters are cheap to type, and the question of whether any of them deserves permanent status is open. The testbed offers them as an evaluation set, off by default.

None of the three is derivable from Cyrillic. Kyrgyz Cyrillic writes one а, one х, and one в, so cyrToJany cannot produce ä, x, or w from source text without knowing which words are loans. They are therefore compose-mode letters: available when a person writes Latin directly, never emitted by automatic conversion. janyToCyr accepts them as input and folds each back to the base letter (ä → а, x → х, w → в), which is the §9.1 native-priority rule applied to a new case — the distinction survives in Latin and is lost on the way back, exactly as loan ц and щ are. Search folding unifies them the same way, so the lost distinction does not fragment an index (§9.4). The reference engine keeps the set in one place (EXTENDED_LETTERS in src/alphabet.ts); adding or removing a compose-mode letter is a one-line change there.

ä is the one that does phonological work. The other two refine the spelling of loanwords. ä marks harmony class, and harmony class is what the q rule reads (§6): äka, ükä, and källä are front-harmonic and take velar [k], while aqa and qalla are back-harmonic and take uvular [q]. Without ä the rule cannot tell these apart; with it, the rule has the information it needs. This is the testbed's most interesting single experiment: run southern text through q mode with and without ä and see whether the second configuration is measurably more accurate.

x carries a cost the other two do not. In Latin text of any kind, x already has a ubiquitous international value — Linux, LAX, X Factor, taxi — and a Kyrgyz reader meets those strings constantly. Adopting x for the velar fricative gives one letter two readings that no rule separates, and it drags search folding with it (§9.4). The argument for the split rests on the fact that Xaram and Buhara genuinely differ in Kyrgyz speech; the argument against is that keeping x faithful to its international value may be worth more than marking a distinction Cyrillic has done without for eighty-five years. This is exactly the sort of question the evaluation set exists to settle.

w is the weakest case of the three, because intervocalic [w] is largely the predictable realization of /b/ rather than a contrast, and Principle 3 says predictable allophones do not get letters — the same reasoning that unified k in §6. If w earns a place, it will be on the strength of loanwords rather than of the intervocalic realization.

One distinction that does not arise. Arabic loans carrying a glottal stop in Uzbek and Tajik (маъно, таъсир) entered Kyrgyz without it: the Kyrgyz words are маани and таасир, written and spoken with vowel length, and the glottal-stop spellings belong to the neighboring languages rather than to the Kyrgyz lexicon. No letter or modifier is needed, and the \p{L}+ property of §5.4 is preserved for free.

The limiting principle for anything added to this set: the sound must distinguish words for its speakers, Cyrillic must be unable to represent it, and it must not be predictable from context. ä passes all three; x passes the first two, since Xaram and Buhara differ in a way no rule predicts; w is arguable on the third.

11.3 Engine, layouts, and CLI

The conversion engine (src/convert.ts) is pure TypeScript with no runtime dependencies and runs unmodified on Node.js, in browsers, and on edge workers. Keyboard layouts for macOS (keymaps/jany-skript.keylayout) and Linux XKB map ö, ü, í, ŋ, ç, ş to single modified keystrokes. A CLI (node dist/src/cli.js) supports pipeline use for corpus work. The option couplings described in §11.1 belong to the testbed rather than to the mapping, and live in one shared module (src/testbedPresets.ts) so that the interface and its tests agree on them.

11.4 Governance

This is version 1 of the orthography, published as a proposal rather than a standard, and the project is structured so that disagreement produces changes rather than forks-by-frustration:

• Every contested choice is a toggle in the testbed, with the alternatives implemented rather than described.
• Users can vote on presets and submit feedback through the platform.
• Everything is open source. Issues, edge cases, and corpus counterexamples are accepted on GitHub, and anyone may review the mapping rules in SPEC.md, propose changes, or fork.
• Versions are numbered and changes are logged. A machine-readable version marker travelling with converted text — so a document can declare which engine version produced it and be reconverted safely — is a natural next step but is not yet implemented; it is listed in §13.6.

The intended failure mode is falsification, not adoption pressure. A reproducible case where the engine corrupts native Kyrgyz is worth more to this project than agreement.

12. Sociolinguistic and Political Context

12.1 Where the question actually stands

Kyrgyzstan has changed alphabet four times in a century: Arabic script, then Latin from 1928 to 1940, then Cyrillic [3]. The current question is not academic in origin but political. Musaev's summary is that alphabets and orthographies are adopted by resolution of the Jogorku Kenesh and require a presidential decree, and that scholars may only propose [3]. In April 2023, after the chairman of the National Commission on the State Language told parliament that scholars and the public were ready to move to Latin if the political decision were made, the president publicly reprimanded him and stated that the discussion was premature and that development of the state language should continue in Cyrillic [3]. Russia suspended dairy imports from Kyrgyzstan days later [8].

This is the environment any Kyrgyz Latin proposal enters, and it is worth being clear about what follows from it.

12.2 What Jany-Skript is and is not asking for

Jany-Skript does not advocate a state transition. It is a tool for exploring the question and for making the informal writing that already exists more consistent. If the state question is settled in fifty or a hundred years, or never, the project still has a use: millions of Kyrgyz speakers are typing Latin today with no convention, and a documented convention is worth having independent of any decree.

That framing is not a rhetorical hedge. It changes the design. A proposal seeking legislation can assume a maintained loanword lexicon, a curriculum, and enforcement, and can therefore afford q (§6). A proposal that must work the moment someone opens a repository cannot, and must be derivable, dictionary-free, and typable on hardware that already exists.

12.3 Costs and constraints that belong on the page

• Cost and capacity. The recurring domestic objection to Latinization is that it is expensive and that education has more urgent needs. The objection is serious and is not addressed by better letter design.
• A multilingual state. Kyrgyzstan is not monolingual. Russian has official status, and Uzbek, Dungan, and other communities write in Cyrillic. A Kyrgyz Latin transition would not move those languages, so Cyrillic would remain in daily use whatever happened to Kyrgyz. Any realistic plan is a plan for coexistence, not replacement — which is also an argument for a converter that runs in both directions.
• Geopolitics. Script change in Central Asia is read in Moscow as distancing, and the 2023 dairy episode [8] is a concrete instance. This is a real cost to any state-level transition and a reason a non-state, tool-first project can do useful work that a policy campaign cannot.
• Adoption is not decreed. Kyrgyzstan's own 2004 orthography reform was reversed when the public did not accept it [3], and Uzbekistan's transition has run since 1993 without completing [3]. Whatever is adopted has to be adoptable by people who did not ask for it.
• Generational asymmetry. Readers educated in Cyrillic and readers who grew up typing Latin on phones want different things from an orthography. The two-register design (§10) is a partial answer: the formal register serves print and the classroom, the casual register serves the phone, and both fold to the same key.

13. Open Questions and Future Work

Some of these are experiments the testbed is built to support; the rest are specification work not yet done.

13.1 Tokenization (predicted, untested)

Claim: monolithic Latin encoding tokenizes more efficiently than mixed-script text, and comparably to or better than Cyrillic.

Test: take a fixed corpus (Kyrgyz Wikipedia, or FLORES-200 kir_Cyrl for a clean parallel set), render it in Cyrillic, canonical Jany-Skript, a CTA-aligned configuration, and a mixed-script configuration, and measure tokens per word under several tokenizers.

What would refute it: Latin Kyrgyz tokenizing worse than Cyrillic in widely used models. This is a plausible outcome, since Cyrillic Kyrgyz is far better represented in training data than any Latin Kyrgyz, and it would need to be reported if found.

13.2 Language identification

Claim: orthographic divergence from Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Uzbek helps Kyrgyz remain identifiable.

Test: run a language identifier over Kyrgyz text in canonical and CTA-aligned configurations and compare misclassification rates.

13.3 Register mergers

Test: count the distinct word types merged by each ASCII fallback (c/s versus ch/sh) over a corpus, and report both numbers alongside the round-trip loss rate by word class.

13.4 Rendering

Claim: inline Cyrillic ө is visually inconsistent with surrounding Latin text, independent of whether the font covers Cyrillic (§4.2).

Test: render kөl and köl across a matrix of common UI, web, and serif fonts, and record for the mid-word glyph the x-height ratio against the adjacent Latin lowercase, the stroke weight, and any baseline offset. Report which fonts substitute and which merely mismatch.

What would refute it: metrics within a few percent of the Latin lowercase across the widely used stacks, with substitution confined to fonts that genuinely lack Cyrillic.

13.5 Input

Test: keystrokes and time per 1,000 characters on a standard layout with and without the custom keymap, and on unmodified iOS and Android keyboards. The ŋ availability claim in §5.3 is confirmed for the Android keyboard in the US locale only, and should be checked on iOS and in other locales as keyboard versions change.

13.6 Specification work not yet done

• A collation tailoring and a stated alphabet order for sorting (§9.4).
• A BCP 47 language tag convention (ky-Latn, possibly with a registered variant subtag) so text can declare which system it uses.
• A CLDR transliteration rule set, which would make the mapping available to any CLDR-based platform.
• A stress-notation convention for teaching materials and dictionaries, which must not be the acute, since the acute is the glide (§4.4).
• Orthographic rules beyond the letter level: capitalization, hyphenation, abbreviations, the treatment of Russian personal names and surnames, and a policy for whether loanwords are spelled from their Russian source or from Kyrgyz pronunciation. Capitalization has a Jany-Skript-specific case that a Cyrillic-based standard never faces: the multi-character graphemes ía, ío, íu, and ts, plus the digraph fallbacks, each need a stated rule for sentence case (Ía) against all-caps (ÍA), since only the first character of the grapheme carries the capital in the first and both do in the second.
• Whether q mode should also derive ğ (§6).
• A machine-readable version marker for converted text (§11.4), so a document can declare which engine version produced it.
• Promoting the documentation-conformance check from a curated example set to a full extractor. The current checker gates a hand-maintained list of pairs and additionally scans the prose for cyrillic ↔ latin arrow pairs it does not yet cover, warning on any it finds; a complete extractor that infers direction and configuration from the prose would close the gap that curation leaves.
• Handwriting and pedagogy: nothing here has been tested with learners, and cedillas and acutes behave differently in handwriting than in type.

14. Conclusion

An orthography succeeds when it balances phonological fidelity, typographic clarity, and typing ergonomics — and, now, when it survives contact with search engines, tokenizers, and unmodified keyboards. To illustrate the canonical register's visual rhythm, here are two lines from Almash Choibekova's Mahabat dastany:

"Büldürköndör şiresin tökkön kezde, Bürküt şaŋşyp asmanga uçkan kezde."

Observations:

1. Typographic rhythm. The cedillas sit inside the line without disturbing its horizontal alignment; ŋ in şaŋşyp stays visually distinct from n without adding height.
2. Harmonic texture. Both lines are predominantly front-harmonic (Büldürköndör, tökkön, kezde, Bürküt), with the back-vowel asmanga uçkan providing contrast in the second — the alternation is within and across the lines rather than one line against the other.
3. Legibility. A native speaker reads both lines without ambiguity, which is the standard every choice in this document should be held to.

A century after Tynystanov's Latin alphabet, the same historical thread runs through Musaev's draft, and that draft waits on a political decision that may not come soon [3]. Jany-Skript does not need that decision to arrive. It is built to be useful the moment someone opens the repository, on the terms Kyrgyz speakers have already been writing Latin for years: informally, inconsistently, and constantly.

Linguists, engineers, and policymakers are invited to test these choices rather than take them on trust — open the testbed, read the mapping rules in SPEC.md, and file an issue with any case the engine gets wrong.

Zamanbap, erkin jana tabigyí jazuu egemen elibizge sanariptik doorunda kyzmat kylsyn. (May a modern, open, and natural orthography serve our independent people in the digital era.)

15. References

[1] "Adoption of Latin-Based Common Turkic Alphabet." The Times of Central Asia, 12 September 2024. https://timesca.com/adoption-of-latin-based-common-turkic-alphabet/

[2] "Turkic States Agree On Common Latin Alphabet, But Kyrgyzstan Happy With Its Cyrillic Script." RFE/RL, 3 October 2024. https://www.rferl.org/a/common-turkic-alphabet-kyrgyz-kazakh-uzbek-turkmen-latin-cyrillic/33137392.html

[3] Жангазиев, Максат. "Нужен ли тюркоязычным странам общий алфавит?" Азаттык Азия (RFE/RL), 25 September 2024. https://www.azattyqasia.org/a/33134603.html — includes a reproduction of Musaev's proposed alphabet chart. Kyrgyz original: https://www.azattyk.org/a/33125096.html

[4] "Kyrgyz alphabets." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrgyz_alphabets — for the 1928–1938/1940 Latin alphabet correspondence table and the vowel length inventory. Primary source cited there: Сумарокова, О.Л. (2021), Кыргызский алфавит: долгий путь к кириллице, KRSU.

[5] "New version of Latin-based Kazakh alphabet presented at government." Kazinform, 2021. https://www.inform.kz/en/new-version-of-latin-based-kazakh-alphabet-presented-at-government_a3746549

[6] Unicode Technical Standard #10: Unicode Collation Algorithm. https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/

[7] Kudo, T. & Richardson, J. (2018). "SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing." EMNLP 2018 (system demonstrations).

[8] "Romanization of Kyrgyz." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Kyrgyz — comparative table of ALA-LC, BGN/PCGN, ISO 9, and Common Turkic systems; government adoption of BGN/PCGN for geographic names; the April 2023 dairy suspension. Primary sources cited there: BGN romanization of Kyrgyz (US Board on Geographic Names, 2017); UNGEGN report, 2016; ISO 9:1995.

[9] "Kazakhstan Changes Its Alphabet. Again!" Eurasianet, 20 February 2018. https://eurasianet.org/kazakhstan-changes-its-alphabet-again

[10] "What will be the Kyrgyz Latin alphabet." qyrgyz.com. https://qyrgyz.com/post/path-of-kyrgyz-latin-script — for the January-to-April 2021 Kazakh change from Ŋ to Ñ and the 2021 Uzbek draft.

[11] Unicode Standard Annex #29: Unicode Text Segmentation. https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/

[12] Unicode Character Database, SpecialCasing.txt (Turkic i/ı case mappings). https://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/SpecialCasing.txt

[13] "Кыргызская латиница / Кыргыз тилинин латын алфавити." qyrgyz.com. https://www.qyrgyz.com/kyrgyzskaya-latinitsa

[14] "Kazakh alphabets." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_alphabets — 2017 decree and the 2021 postponement of the completion date to 2031.

[15] Bazarbayeva, Z.M. & Chukayeva, T.K. (2021). "The new Kazakh latinized script." Bulletin of L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Philology Series 3(136). https://bulphil.enu.kz/index.php/main/article/download/291/143/419

[16] Unicode Standard Annex #15: Unicode Normalization Forms. https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/

Further reading

These are not cited above but bear directly on the arguments made here, and are recommended to anyone extending this work.

• Johanson, L. & Csató, É.Á. (eds.). The Turkic Languages, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2022 — for Kyrgyz phonology and the comparative Turkic picture, including the origin of Kyrgyz long vowels.
• Kara, D.S. Kyrgyz. Lincom Europa, 2003.
• Sebba, M. Spelling and Society: The Culture and Politics of Orthography Around the World. Cambridge University Press, 2007 — the standard treatment of orthography as a social rather than purely linguistic object.
• Unseth, P. (2005). "Sociolinguistic parallels between choosing scripts and languages." Written Language & Literacy 8(1).
• Cahill, M. & Rice, K. (eds.). Developing Orthographies for Unwritten Languages. SIL International, 2014.
• Venezky, R. (2004). "In search of the perfect orthography." Written Language & Literacy 7(2).
• Fierman, W. (2009). "Identity, symbolism, and the politics of language in Central Asia." Europe-Asia Studies 61(7).
• "Prospects of Kyrgyz language transition to the Latin script based on experience of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan." Language Problems and Language Planning (2025). https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lplp.25003.tok
• Petrov, A. et al. (2023). "Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languages." NeurIPS 2023.
• Washington, J.N., Salimzyanov, I. & Tyers, F.M. (2014). "Finite-state morphological transducers for three Kypchak languages." LREC 2014 — relevant to building morphological tooling on top of this orthography.