Sport in Kyrgyzstan - Languages

Languages

Kyrgyzstan is one of the two former Soviet republics in Central Asia to retain Russian as an official language, Kazakhstan being the other. It added the Kyrgyz language to become an officially bilingual country in September 1991.

Kyrgyz is a member of the Turkic group of languages. It was written in the Arabic alphabet until the twentieth century. Latin script was introduced and adopted in 1928, and was subsequently replaced by Cyrillic script in 1941.

According to the 2009 census, 4.1 million people spoke Kyrgyz as native or second language and 2.5 million spoke Russian as native or second language. Uzbek is the second most widely spoken native language, followed by Russian; Russian is the most widely spoken second language, followed by Kyrgyz, Uzbek and English.

Language name Native speakers Second-language speakers Total speakers
Kyrgyz 3,830,556 271,187 4,121,743
Russian 482,243 2,109,393 2,591,636
Uzbek 772,561 97,753 870,314
English 28,416 28,416
French 641 641
German 10 10
Other 277,433 31,411

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