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Kyrgyz or Kirgiz, also Kirghiz, Kyrghiz, Qyrghiz ( , , Kyrgyz tili) is a Turkic language and, together with Russian, an official language of Kyrgyzstan. Genetically it is most closely related to Altay and more distantly so to Kazakh; however, modern-day language convergence has resulted in an increasing degree of mutual intelligibility between Kyrgyz and Kazakh.
Kyrgyz is spoken by about 4 million people in Kyrgyzstan, China, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Russia. Kyrgyz was originally written in the Uniform Turkic Alphabet, gradually replaced by an Arabic alphabet until the mid-20th century, when a Latin alphabet was briefly introduced, replaced due to Soviet policy with a Cyrillic alphabet which eventually became common and has remained so to this day, though some Kyrgyz still use the Arabic alphabet. When Kyrgyzstan became independent following the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, there was a popular idea among some Kyrgyz people to revert to the Latin alphabet, but the plan was never implemented.
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