Lessons · 1 of 24
Reading Karachay
The two scripts, the handful of new sounds, and why vowels travel in packs.
Karachay is normally written in Cyrillic. This site will show you every word in either script: real Cyrillic, or Karachay Latin, which gives every sound its own letter. 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:
| Cyrillic | Here | Sounds like | Hear it in |
|---|---|---|---|
| къ | k (deep) | a k pressed further back in the throat | qar — snow |
| гъ | ğ | a g from the same deep place — close to a soft gargle | ağaç — wood, forest |
| х | h | not the soft English h — the rasping one, Arabic خ or the ch in Scottish "loch" | hıçın — the stuffed flatbread |
| нг | ng | the ng in "sing" — one sound, not n + g | ming — thousand |
| дж | c | the j in "jam" | jangur — rain |
| ч | ç | the ch in "chat" | çay — tea |
| ш | ş | the sh in "shore" | şorpa — soup |
| ы | ı | the vowel in "roses" — an i said with a flat tongue | qız — girl |
| ю | ü | German ü — say "ee" with rounded lips | tülkü — fox |
| ё | ö | German ö — say "eh" with rounded lips | kök — sky |
| у | w | the w in "water" (when it acts as a consonant) | taw — mountain |
The three tinted rows are one family: q, 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 q softens to ğ between vowels — çıq ("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.
къ and к are two different letters, and so are гъ and г. Karachay Latin keeps both pairs apart — q against k, ğ against g — which is the whole point of one letter per sound, so either script will show you 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.
What do these say?
qar
snow — with the deep k
jangur
rain — c like "jam", ñ like "sing"
tülkü
fox — both vowels from the front family
ayaq
foot — both vowels from the back family
hıçın
the stuffed flatbread — the h rasps, like Arabic خ