Lessons · 1 of 18

Reading Karachay

The three spellings, the handful of new sounds, and why vowels travel in packs.

Karachay is normally written in Cyrillic. This site shows every word in your choice of three spellings — real Cyrillic, a Turkish-style Latin spelling, and a plain-English spelling with no special letters at all. The switcher lives in the header on every page, and everything in these lessons follows it, so pick whichever one feels comfortable and change your mind whenever you like.

Most of the language's sounds are ones English already has. Here are the ones that are new, each with a word you'll meet again in the word banks:

The three tinted rows are one family: k, ğ and h are all made at the very back of the mouth, and that is why they keep trading places with each other. A k softens to ğ between vowels — çık ("go out") becomes çığama ("I go out") — and the ending ğan hardens to han after a voiceless consonant, which is why "said" is aythan and not aytğan. Lesson 8 puts that rule to work; for now it is enough to hear that they belong together.

One thing only the Cyrillic column can show you: къ and к are two different letters, and so are гъ and г. Both Latin spellings write each pair the same way — k and g — while the Turkish-style spelling does keep ğ apart from g. Either way къ and к both come out k, so switch the script to Cyrillic whenever you want to see which one a word actually has.

Vowels travel in packs

Every vowel belongs to one of two families. The back family is a, ı, o, u — said toward the back of the mouth. The front family is e, i, ö, ü — said toward the front. A word almost always keeps to one family, and here is the part that matters: every ending changes its vowel to match the word it attaches to.

That's why "I went" is bardım but "I came" is keldim — the same ending, wearing a back vowel after bar and a front vowel after kel. Once your ear expects this, endings stop being memorization and start being melody: you can often guess the right form just by saying it out loud and hearing which vowel fits.

You never need to compute this consciously. The tables on this site always show the matched form, and after a few lessons the pattern installs itself.