Long vowels in Kyrgyz language: Characteristics and evolutionary steps

Abstract

The historical relationships had by Kyrgyz people with various societies/tribes in Africa, Asia, and Europe resulted in evolutionary and revolutionary changes generally in their language vowel structures and pronunciations. The general Turkic writing style, Persio-Arabic writing styles as well as Cyrillic and Latin writing styles, coupled with influences of loanwords from Russia, Mongolian, Kazakh, and Uzbek, among other languages have a long time of manifestation in the Kyrgyz vowels. The Kyrgyz language has both short and long vowels. All of the long vowels can appear at any word position except “üü” which does not appear at the beginning of words. Some long vowels originated from the evolution/revolution of the consonants and vowels inherently in the language, some are results of prolonged pronunciation of short vowels, some happened because conjugation are realized from the localized phonetic transformation of the borrowed words and phonetic structure in rhymes. This paper discusses these issues to linguistically document and reveals the evolutionary and revolutionary movements had by the Kyrgyz language with respect to the long vowels. The paper hopes that the data presented below could be of significance, not only in historical linguistics, but also in sociolinguistics, and general linguistics.